The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  The answer was, by now, familiar: it was precisely the monstrosity of the discrepancy that would allow Germany to rise to the height of humanity. “Germany, as the deficiency of the political present constituted a world of its own, will not be able to throw down the specific German limitations without throwing down the general limitation of the political present”—its own and everyone else’s.

  But how could it be done politically? “Where, then, is the positive possibility of a German emancipation?”

  Answer: In the formulation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only human, title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-round antithesis to the premises of German statehood; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.

  Just as the Jewish spirit was embodied in capitalism, the spirit of Germany was embodied in the proletariat. Just as the Jews stood for unbridled acquisitiveness and self-interest, the Germans stood for the creativity of absence and innocence. “As philosophy finds its material weapon in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapon in philosophy. Once the lightning of thought has squarely struck this ingenuous soil of the people, the emancipation of the Germans into men will be accomplished.” And once the emancipation of Germans into men was accomplished, the emancipation of man would be assured:

  Let us sum up the result. The only liberation of Germany which is practically possible is liberation from the point of view of that theory which declares man to be the supreme being for man. Germany can emancipate itself from the Middle Ages only if it emancipates itself at the same time from the partial victories over the Middle Ages. In Germany, no form of bondage can be broken without breaking all forms of bondage. Germany, which is renowned for its thoroughness, cannot make a revolution unless it is a thorough one. The emancipation of the German is the emancipation of man. The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat. Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendence of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization of philosophy.

  When all the inner conditions are met, the day of the German resurrection will be heralded by the crowing of the cock of Gaul.96

  The solution to the German question followed from the solution to the Jewish question: “Once society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism—huckstering and its preconditions—the Jew will have become impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object, because the subjective basis of Judaism, practical need, has been humanized, and because the conflict between man’s individual-sensuous existence and his species-existence has been abolished.” On the one hand, “the social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism,” and the emancipation of society from Judaism is the emancipation of mankind from oppression. On the other, the emancipation of the German from all forms of bondage is the alliance of German philosophy with the universal proletariat in the name of the emancipation of man. The emancipation of man ultimately depends on the reformation of the Jews and the resurrection of Germany.97

  The entire edifice of Marxist theory—complete with its Mephistophelian frame and rich rhetorical ornamentation—was built on these foundations. Hegel’s Preface to his Philosophy of Right ends with the owl of Minerva spreading its wings at the approach of dusk. Marx’s introduction to his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right ends with the cock of Gaul (the gallus from Gallus) crowing at the dawn of a new day—the same one, presumably, that awoke the god of day and chased off the ghost of Hamlet’s father. As Marx himself would explain, the philosophers had only interpreted the world in various ways; the point was to change it—through revolution and resurrection. Marx’s discovery of the proletariat had accomplished this task.

  The question of why Marx, of all the cocks heralding the German resurrection, ended up conquering much of the world is just as impossible and irresistible as the question of why Jesus, of all the Jewish prophets who assumed the motions and gestures of inspired persons, ended up founding one of the world’s most owl-resistant civilizations. One possible answer is that they were, in fact, quite similar. Marx, like Jesus and unlike Mazzini or Mickiewicz, succeeded in translating a tribal prophecy into a language of universalism. He was his own Paul (in case Engels proved ineffective): the emancipation from Judaism and the resurrection of Germany were buried under the weight of the emancipation from capitalism and the resurrection of humankind.

  Perhaps most remarkably, he succeeded in translating a prophecy of salvation into the language of science. As Celsus wrote about Jesus and other would-be messiahs and their visions, “To these promises are added strange, fanatical, and quite unintelligible words, of which no rational person can find the meaning: for so dark are they, as to have no meaning at all; but they give occasion to every fool or impostor to apply them to suit his own purposes.” Marx, too, combined an extremely straightforward promise of deliverance with obscure oracular formulas that defied the comprehension of his future followers—much to their satisfaction, apparently. But Marx did not just alternate simplicity with complexity, clarity with obfuscation, striking metaphors with commodity-money-commodity equations; he expressed his eschatology in the form of a scientific forecast based on falsifiable claims and, most important, involving sociologically defined protagonists.

  One of the greatest challenges for Christian millenarians trying to enact the New Testament apocalyptic scenario had been to distinguish between the saints and the reprobates and to understand the secret of Babylon’s power and whoredom. Marx solved this problem by using categories—the “bourgeoisie” and the “proletariat,” above all—that firmly bound the moral to the scientific, the subjective to the objective, and the individual to the collective. If society consisted of “classes” of people; if class belonging could be determined by a minimally trained believer; if conviction (inner righteousness) was directly related to membership; and if the new, non-illusory Armageddon was a class war, then the Anabaptist problem of lashing out at the Antichrist’s self-regenerating “cunning army” (not to mention the Jacobin problem of trying to keep up with the hydra of counterrevolution) would be solved once and for all—by means of science. Jesus’s “rich” and “poor” would be neatly classified, and Müntzer’s descendants could “cut down the red poppies and the blue cornflowers” in the absolute certainty that, as originally predicted, all the participants would be color-coded and registered in special books. “Do not harm the land or the sea or the trees until we put a seal on the foreheads of the servants of our God.” Marx, like Jesus, died a failed prophet, with few disciples and fewer signs of an imminent German resurrection. Like Jesus, he was rediscovered posthumously by barbarians who found his prophecy congenial (owing, at least in part, to “the problems-of-the-present that a Russian has.”)98

  The prophecy itself was utterly familiar. There was the prelapsarian fraternity of the innocent, the original sin of discovering distinctions, the division of the world into the hungry and the well-fed, the martyrdom and resurrection of a universal redeemer, the final battle between the forces of good and evil, the violent triumph of last over first; and the eventual overcoming of the futility, unpredictability, and contingency of human existence. The emotional center of the story was the contrast between the suffering of those with nothing but their chains to lose and the “wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.” The new Babylon, like th
e old, had reduced everything to the naked pursuit of cargoes of gold and “compelled all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production”—by, among other things, forcing all women into “prostitution both public and private” and “stripping of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe.” Once again, “the kings of the earth committed adultery with her, and the merchants of the earth grew rich from her excessive luxuries.”99

  But the end was near. “In one day her plagues will overtake her,” and “the great city of Babylon will be thrown down, never to be found again.” The great conflagration was going to happen both because it was inevitable and because Marx’s disciples—the Communists—“have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.” Like all millenarians, they would work hard to bring about the ineluctable. Free will and predestination were one and the same thing. “The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle.” Jesus had been both the messenger and the subject of the message; his disciples had had to both believe the message and help fulfill it by joining the messenger. The Communists merely expressed, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, but “they never ceased, for a single instant, to instill into the working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat” and never forgot that their practical mission consisted in the “formation of the proletariat into a class.”100

  The original mission was an internal German affair. The Communists, according to their Manifesto (written when Marx was thirty and Engels, twenty-eight), needed to spread the good news “in order that the German workers may straightway use, as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social and political conditions that the bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along with its supremacy, and in order that, after the fall of the reactionary classes in Germany, the fight against the bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin.” But the German victory was everyone’s victory, and the Communist Manifesto was—ultimately—addressed to the Gentiles, as well as the Germans: “The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation and with a much more developed proletariat than that of England was in the seventeenth, and France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.”101

  The scheme was strictly trinitarian: the “childlike simplicity” of primitive communism was to be followed by the age of class struggle, which was to be followed by the kingdom of freedom. Likewise, the English Revolution of the seventeenth century had been followed by the French Revolution of the eighteenth century, which was to be followed by the German revolution of the last century of the world as we know it. Marxism itself, according to Lenin, had three sources and three main components: English political economy, French socialism, and German philosophy.102

  Like most millenarian prophets, Marx and Engels acknowledged their predecessors as inspired but blinkered forerunners. They had all—from Thomas Müntzer to Robert Owen—represented “independent outbursts” of proletarian insight and realized the need for the abolition of private property and the family. Indeed, “the theory of the Communists,” according to the Manifesto, “may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” As for the family, it “will vanish as a matter of course when its complement [prostitution] vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.” In the meantime, “all children, from the moment they can leave their mother’s care,” must be educated “in national establishments” that will combine instruction with production. Like most millenarian prophets (as well as millenarian sectarians and their institutionalized heirs, monks and nuns), Marx and Engels focused on the elimination of private property and the family as the most powerful and mutually reinforcing sources of inequality. Like most millenarian prophets, they wanted to turn the transitional, premillennial world into a sect—which is to say, to transform a complex, unequal society organized around property and procreation into a simple, fraternal society organized around common beliefs, possessions, and sexual partners (or sexual abstinence).103

  Like most millenarian prophets, but unlike their acknowledged “utopian” predecessors (and many unacknowledged ones, including the Marquis de Sade and Restif de la Bretonne), Marx and Engels were extremely vague about what the kingdom of freedom would look like, with regard to either possessions or sex. As Engels wrote in Anti-Dühring,

  To the crude conditions of capitalist production and the crude class conditions corresponded crude theories. The solution of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, the utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain. Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason. It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the example of model experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed as utopian; the more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure fantasies.104

  This is true. It makes perfect sense to apply the term “utopian” to those who discover a new and more perfect system of social order and try to impose it upon society from without by propaganda, and, wherever possible, by the example of model experiments. Marx and Engels were not utopians—they were prophets. They did not talk about what a perfect system of social order should be and how and why it should be adopted or tested; they knew with absolute certainty that it was coming—right now, all by itself, and thanks to their words and deeds. Unlike Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen, and like Jesus and his many descendants, they had a lot less to say about future perfection than about how it would arrive—and how soon. And, of course, it would arrive very soon and very violently, and it would be followed by the rule of the saints over the nations with an iron scepter, and then those who had overcome would inherit all, and the old order of things would pass away, and there would be a new earth, and the glory and honor of the nations would be brought into it, and nothing impure would ever enter it, nor would anyone who did what was shameful or deceitful.105

  In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!106

  Unlike Fourier and Saint-Simon, Marx never explained how abilities were to be measured and what, besides unforced and undivided labor, constituted legitimate human needs. Marx’s own sample list included the freedom “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” Ultimately, it seems, needs were to coincide with desires, and desires were to reflect “natural necessity.” The transition to Communism was “humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom,” and freedom, as Hegel had discovered, was “the insight into necessity.” In Engels’s formulation, “Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of system
atically making them work towards definite ends…. Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature, a control founded on knowledge of natural necessity.”107

  Allowing for the customary substitution of “natural laws” for “God,” this is a traditional Christian understanding of freedom as the coincidence of human will with the will of God. When Dante entered the lowest sphere of Paradise and met the spirits of inconstant nuns, he asked one of them if she longed for a higher place:

  Together with her fellow shades she smiled

  at first; then she replied to me with such

  gladness, like one who burns with love’s first flame:

  Brother, the power of love appeases our

  will so we only long for what we have;

  we do not thirst for greater blessedness.

  Should we desire a higher sphere than ours,

  then our desires would be discordant with

  the will of Him who has assigned us here,

  but you’ll see no such discord in these spheres;

  to live in love is here necessity,

  if you think on love’s nature carefully.

  The essence of this blessed life consists

  in keeping to the boundaries of God’s will,

  through which our wills become one single will;

  so that, as we are ranged from step to step