But another group of people scoff at these eager and arrogant developmentalists and ascenders. The issue is not to “go somewhere” or to “become someone” or to “develop”—it is to come home, to return to something basic and fundamental within us, to just be, to rest with the here-and-now, to stop trying to control and steer anything, least of all history. We don’t need to aim for the sun, just be ourselves, just be simple. We must come closer to our nature, to what is real, to the authentic child that we really are. We can let go of all those egoic strivings, all those lofty ideas and ideals, of all ideology and metamodernism schmetamodernism.
Which one of these two perspectives is true, then—ascenders or descenders—those who seek to climb and develop or those who seek to stay simple and direct and simply be? You know the answer already. It is both and.
We must grow and we must come home; we must both travel and stay; we must be both sincere and ironic. We both “must” and “not must” anything at all. We must grow up to become the children we always-already are . And political metamodernism must facilitate and make possible the emergence of settings in which we can swarm as children.
In the year 1212—in an event at the crossroads of fact and fiction, one that may not have taken place but has been told as true over the centuries—nearly 50,000 European boys and girls are said to have rebelled against their parents and the Church to join a crusade to the Holy Land; to win by love what their fathers had failed to take by force. But before they even reached Rome nearly all of them had fallen to hardship. Those who went on would pay for their innocent courage in brothels and slave markets. [151]
The time was not ripe for a Children’s Crusade, for the naive will of swarms of idealistic warriors to commit their playful souls for the betterment of the world by spiritual struggle. And yet that is, ultimately, what must happen. We don’t need tough and “mature” men, but playful boys and girls, just as Nietzsche said it. Human beings who are in love with life itself—and with glittering, gleaming faith and iron resolve in the face of utter meaninglessness.
The world is maintained by men, it is reproduced by women—but it is created by children. By kids on mischievous adventures. What is the core principle of humanity if not the extension of childhood?
In nature, maturity is the rule and childhood the exception. Childhood is rare. It is chosen. It has not yet paid the price of maturity: stagnation, ossification. It is freshness, it is growth, it is movement, it is speed and exhilaration, it is higher freedom and deeper equality. As an animal rights advocate, I am all for caring about adults; they too have feelings. But in the last instance, this is a child’s world.
Make no mistake—our world will be conquered, ruled and transformed by an army of children. Our struggle-reborn-as-play must continue until reality itself has shifted, until a million complexly interrelated situations have changed, until what is written on our banners has been inscribed into the constitutions of all countries and governing bodies of the world.
And what is written on our banners is, ultimately, what is always-already written in our hearts: solidarity with all sentient beings, across all of space-time, from all possible perspectives, from the greatest depths of our love.
Or do you have anything better to do?
Appendix A:
WHY COMMUNISM FAILED
Welcome to Appendix A—why communism failed. Did you read through the book and found yourself hungry for more? Or did the red scare creep up on you so that you needed to calm your mind by finding out just how exactly this Hanzi Freinacht argues against communism?
Either way, please take a deep breath and chant the following hymn of utopia:
“ Beasts of England, Beasts of Ireland,
Beasts of every land and clime,
Hearken to my joyful tidings
Of the Golden future time.
Soon or late the day is coming,
Tyrant Man shall be o’erthrown,
And the fruitful fields of England
Shall be trod by beasts alone.
Rings shall vanish from our noses,
And the harness from our back,
Bit and spur shall rust forever,
Cruel whips no more shall crack.”
The poem goes on for a while after that, and it gets even better. You know where it is from, don’t you?
Although it might be imagined as a tune of insurgency against today’s factory farming, it’s actually the anthem from George Orwell’s Animal Farm —the fable in which the animals take over a farm and run it themselves under the banner: All animals are equal.
You may recall that Old Major, an aged hog, teaches this song, “Beasts of England”, to the other animals before he dies; the whispers of a promised revolution. And suddenly, shortly after, the opportunity for a revolution presents itself. Farmer Jones is driven from the land—and so the fields are trod by beasts alone. But, as the story goes, the scheming pig Comrade Napoleon seizes power and the ideals of the revolution are perverted, one by one, until the small pig elite finally declare that all animals are equal, yes, but some animals are “more equal than others”.
Of course, Orwell wrote this as a commentary on the Soviet revolution and the communist experiment. The Russian revolutionaries had been wary of “Bonapartism” in the early days of the Soviet Union, i.e. that someone might snatch the momentum and take charge as dictator, like Napoleon Bonaparte had done in the wake of the French Revolution. Few suspected that the quiet and reserved Joseph Stalin was a Napoleon in disguise (which, undoubtedly, is what Orwell hinted at when he named the dictator-pig in Animal Farm ).
I’m bringing this topic up—the communist experiment—because my own work on “political metamodernism” and “the Nordic Ideology” inevitably gets compared to communism. The failure of communism is also a fruitful place to initiate a deeper discussion about political metamodernism.
Although it is not a comparison I am entirely comfortable with, it is not irrelevant. There is a kind of post-Marxist undercurrent in much of metamodern thinking: to see society as evolving through discernable stages, and the current capitalist global society as one such stage, to relate to the totality of human experience and try to generate a more rational and existentially sound foundation for it, to want to develop not only society but also our inner lives and emotions, to strive for higher forms of freedom, fairness and solidarity. Hey, I even named this book Nordic Ideology with an ironic wink at Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology.
But if there is a vague spiritual lineage connecting political metamodernism to communism, it is only just that: a vague, spiritual link on a general and abstract level.
So let me highlight some key differences between my thinking and the many strands of Marxism. Let us begin by asking why communism failed, and what perspectives might be needed in its place.
Don’t Blame Comrade Napoleon
What went wrong with the Soviet Union and the communist revolution can hardly be said to hinge upon the wrongdoings or moral flaws of any single person like Joseph Stalin.
Or Vladimir Lenin, for that matter. It’s true that Lenin represented a kind of authoritarian deviation from mainstream Marxist socialism, but it is also a fact that the only kind of socialist system (in name if nothing else) that has ever existed on any larger scale has been of the authoritarian bent. If you list all of the libertarian socialists, anarchists and left-wing Marxists, these are all theorists and philosophers. If you list the leading authoritarian socialists, these are all real leaders with real power. Coincidence?
It’s not a coincidence. Some people like to say that “real socialism has never been tried”. But as you’ll see in the following, it has never been tried because it has never been possible in the first place. And this impossibility is exactly what has derailed all real attempts at socialism.
Let’s go on with the story. Lenin’s doctrine which guided the 1917 revolution (or c
oup) was an authoritarian deviation of the ideals of socialism, effectively banning worker control of factories and discarding other socialist elements, and the other Bolshevik leader, Leon Trotsky, soon followed suit in this elitist top-down perspective.
Lenin died in 1924, Stalin took over and from there on it was mounting totalitarianism and violent oppression in spades, culminating in the 1937-38 Great Purge. If Stalin hadn’t won the power struggle, other and similar problems had still been likely to occur. Stalin’s contestant Trotsky (whose Orwellian pig alter ego is called Snowball) was even crazier. He was more optimistic about a communist revolution in Germany (and less optimistic about Stalin’s “socialism in one country”) and would thus have been likely to have adopted a blatantly aggressive foreign policy—more wars, more people killed. Trotsky also had a more radical vision of the malleability of the human mind; that everyone could become Aristotle—an exceedingly dangerous and cult-like idea. Quoting Trotsky himself:
“It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process. All the arts—literature, drama, painting, music and architecture will lend this process beautiful form. More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.” [152]
There’s an interesting tension here: On the one hand, Trotsky approaches some of the metamodern developmental perspectives, seeing the human being as a project of playful self-recreation; on the other hand, he falls into the traps of utopianism (the non-relative kind) and idealizing his own image of what a good human being would be like. He didn’t realize that the only credible form of utopia is relative, and he never referred to any sound theories of psychological development. He simply believed that once a socialist society had been achieved, then a new and better humanity would emerge and a just social order would come into being once and for all. Consequently, everything became a means to this impossible end; “After all”, the zealous revolutionary would think, “what’s a few millions deaths if that’s the price of achieving an absolute utopian ideal?” This, of course, puts one on a path to totalitarianism. We must thus stay clear of the mistakes represented by Trotsky and others like him. These are dangerous intellectual waters we are crossing.
Present-day Marxists often say that critics of Marx have failed to grasp the depth and entirety of Marx’s writings, in particular the three volumes of his magnum opus , Capital . But if you read the writings of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, there can be little doubt they knew their Marx very well. And if you read e.g. Simon Sebag Montefiore’s biographies on Stalin, it is apparent that even Stalin was very intellectually gifted: reading Darwin at thirteen in one sitting, becoming an acclaimed poet at 16, masterminding an impressive bank robbery at 29, and managing an incredibly large and diverse workload as military leader and head of state—all while producing writings that were not necessarily innovative, but certainly well written and incisive. For instance, you have Dialectical and Historical Materialism , in which he relates to not only Marxist doctrine but also a wider philosophical canon including Hegel, Kant, Feuerbach and others. As such, I seriously doubt a better and more detailed reading of Marx is the solution to the problems of Marxism, communism and socialism.
As you may know, Trotsky was eventually murdered on Stalin’s orders by a Soviet agent with an icepick to the head in Mexico City. But communism was doomed to fail long before this. Trotsky wouldn’t have saved the communist experiment. Nor would Lenin, had his health been better.
So don’t blame Comrade Napoleon. Let’s find out what really went wrong.
The Mainstream/Libertarian Account
What then can account for the structural failure of the communist project, as viewed altogether? Well, in all places where you see communism (or “socialist” states claiming to attempt to achieve full communism, which is when the state itself has been rendered obsolete), there are one-party systems, human rights abuses, limits to civil liberties and severe problems with the economy—as recent relapses in Venezuela remind us. These societies simply don’t last; their social sustainability is severely limited.
I suppose you’ve heard the common wisdom response? “Communism was not just a nice idea that turned out to be terrible in practice—it was a terrible idea that was consequently (and predictably) terrible in practice!” All mainstream critiques of communism argue along these lines, more or less. This holds true from the more sophisticated versions, like in the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski’s meticulous studies [153] of the inherent flaws of Marxism, over Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies , to Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s massive, intense literary masterpiece The Gulag Archipelago , which derives the horrors of communist forced labor camps directly from Marxist-Leninist doctrines.
This line of argument (often put forth by libertarians and conservatives, but increasingly by everyone) holds—more or less explicitly—that communism was a mistake because it failed, morally and intellectually, to understand human nature itself . This is the case even in Solzhenitsyn’s existentialist account.
According to the libertarian mainstream account, humans are not collectivist beings who value equality over all—so the argument goes—they are freedom-loving individuals who need to find their own paths in life in order to find meaning and dignity. As such they must be allowed to compete on free markets, serving themselves first—in fair exchanges with one another, where goods and respect are earned by hard work and good character. They must reap the rewards of individual action, of innovation, of reasonable and free competition. In this view, the closer you come to a libertarian capitalist standpoint, the farther away you are from Gulag and the secret police knocking on your door.
But concealed beneath the nice-sounding libertarian creeds of a “freedom-loving individual” is also a somewhat darker assumption: that people are most often rather selfish, and, the reasoning goes, if you try to create a society in which this truth is not honored, it will backfire seriously—because it can ultimately only be built on self-deceit. Instead, the argument goes on, we should build a society in which people can work for their enlightened self-interest, which will generally produce more sustainable relations, more productive behaviors, and a greater abundance of goods and services on the markets (both quality and quantity).
As in Adam Smith’s classical 1776 notion of “the invisible hand”, this argument marries a belief in freedom to a measure of conservatism; a sober and realistic look at people’s moral qualities and real behaviors. It’s true that Smith warned about the corrosive effects of repetitive factory work, but his analysis stopped there. If we let people work selfishly under controlled circumstances (policing, rule of law, private property, consumer rights, etc.), then they will, on average and over time, do something that is collectively good.
Hmm, okay. There may be some truth to these received wisdoms of our day and age. But upon closer inspection, such an appeal to “human nature” and her innate individuality is of course a romantic reciting of beliefs rather than a behavioral-scientific explanation. They just make vague assumptions about “human nature” and engineer morally weighted conclusions from there. This mainstream account of why communism failed has pretty weak explanatory power.
But aren’t there yet more general a
nd structural causes for the spectacular failures of communism? I’m glad you asked, because indeed there are.
A Jammed Information Feedback System
If we’d like to take it one step farther towards a more solid critique, we can look at the issue from the perspective of society’s information processing .
From this perspective, we can see that economic central planning is often a bad idea. The demand for goods and services is extremely difficult to predict on a large scale. Hence it is more intelligent to let many different agents make all the small decisions, “as if their businesses depended upon it”, rather than letting the government make up a five-year plan and be done with it. Simply because these many agents, working with varying timeframes and perspectives, can process much more information, they can carry out more calibrated, sustainable and innovative decisions.
Once you have committed to a five-year plan, there is bound to be any number of errors: shortages and unwanted surpluses. People will have enormous incentives to trade with one another, to remedy the shortages and do away with the surpluses—hence de facto reopening a free market, a rather innocent version of the “black market”. But for the socialist planning to work, such free trade needs to be illegal.
If there are such strong incentives for doing something that is illegal, the legal system must be stretched out to deal with a lot of people and situations. And for a legal system to realistically do that, it has to perform a lot of quick trials (or go after the “kulak” farmers who insist on producing their own goods). Hence the quality of the rule of law is degraded, hence people stop respecting the system altogether, hence corruption becomes rampant—in exactly the kind of system that depends upon the goodwill, mutual trust and solidarity among citizens.
Nordic Ideology Page 55