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Forty-five sketches by the brilliant former Suprematist painter and visionary architect Iakov Chernikhov, all composed between 1925-1933 and published together in his book Architectural Fantasies: 101 Compositions.
For any of my readers who know Russian, please feel free to download the full-text, searchable PDFs of these brilliant texts:
Science on the March (1952) by Alexander Leydenfrost
It’s been said before, but the future just isn’t what it used to be.
Cover of DADA № 1, Juillet 1917
Download DADA № 1, Juillet 1917
à l’occasion de l’expositon de gravures, broderies et reliefs dans la Galerie Dada
(4-29 Mai 1917)
L’art est à présent la sf’ule chose construite, accomplie en soi, dont on ne peut plus rien dire, tellement richesse vitalité sens sagesse: comprendre voir.
Décrire une fleur — rélative poésie plus ou moins fleur de papier. Voir.
Jusqu’à ce qu’on ne, découvrira les vibrations intimes de la dernière c’ellule dans un cerveaudieumathématîque et l’explication des astronomies primaires: l’essence, on décrira toujours l’impossibilité avec des éléments logiques de la continuelle contradiction marécage d’étoiles et de sonneries inutiles. Crapauds des lampions froids aplatis sur l’intelligence déscriptive du ventrerouge. Ce qu’on écrit sur l’art est oeuvre d’éducation et dans ce sens elle peut exister. Nous voulons rendre les hommes meilleurs, qu’ils comprennent que la seule fraternité est dans un moment d’intensité oil le beau est la vie concentrée sur la hauteur d’un fil-defer montant vers l’éclat, tremblement bleu lié à la trrre par nos regards aimants qui couvrent de neige le pic. Le miracle. J’ouvre mon coeur que les hommes soient meilleurs.
Nombre d’artistes ne’ cherchent plus les solutions dans l’objet et dans les relations de l’extérieur, ils sont cosmiques ou primaires décidés simples sages sérieux.
La diversité des artistes d’aujourd’hui serre le jet-d’eau dans une grande liberté-cristal. Et leurs efforts créent de nouveaux organismes clairs. Dans le monde pureté avec les transparences et matérialités de la construction cachée d’une simple image qui se forme. Ils continuent la tradition le passé et leur évolution pousse, lente comme un serpent vers les conséquences intérieures, directes, au delà des surfaces et des réalités.
— TRISTAN TZARA
Entrance to the Perisphere, 1939 New York’s World Fair, Queens. Designed by Harrison and Fouilhoux.
A recent summation of my post “Memories of the Future” appears on the excellent Anti-National Translation website. It is reproduced below. My thanks to the author of that blog.
Ross Wolfe, of the Charnel House, has a long post on the temporality of radical politics, criticising, among other temporal orientations, various forms of hankering after divers real and imaginary pasts, and particularly the longing for a ‘prelapsarian past, of the “good old days” before everything went wrong’. Much of the post is devoted to Franco “Bifo” Berardi and his latest book, After the Future (2011).
Among the targets are Jewbonics/MondoWeiss blogger Max Ajl. His text “Planet of the Fields” was in Jacobin magazine and not published online, as far as I know. Wolfe alleges that:
It soon becomes clear, however, that the only way the author thinks humanity can survive is for it to reinstate the past. Against bourgeois society’s “ceaseless drive to urbanization, industrialization, and capital- and input-intensive agriculture,” Ajl follows Colin Duncan in stressing “the centrality of [‘low-impact’] agriculture.” He thus counterposes an order founded upon a more modest, traditional agrarian model to the megalopolitan nightmare-city of the last couple centuries.[34] In order to carry out this neo-Neolithic revolution, Ajl calls for a policy of “repeasantization” — a telling slip-of-the-pen.[35] Presumably, what he means by this is not literally the restoration of some sort of peasantry, as this feudal title tends to imply a certain legal and political status: enserfment, congenital bondage to the land (the manor or estate of a local nobleman), and the compulsory alienation of one’s property and labor to his lord as part of a corvée system. Most farmers are not peasants. Rather, what Ajl probably has in mind is a new yeomanry, tilling the soil in the bucolic splendor of the countryside. Although he insists that “smallholder agriculture is not an antiquarian curio,” the spirit that animates Ajl’s atavistic vision is clearly conjured out of the ideological ectoplasm of romantic anti-capitalism.[36] It is nourished on “the view that if only capitalism had not come into existence we could all be living in a happy hobbit-land of freed peasants and independent small producers.”[37]
(Personally, I have a problem with the simplistic ortho-Marxism Wolfe seems to be channelling in his criticism of the term “peasantry,” as I believe that the peasantry as a class are defined by the objective contradiction between proletarianisation and autonomy/communisation, but that’s a discussion for another day.)
Wolfe continues, and this is where it becomes relevant to the concerns of this blog:
This would perhaps seem a neat bit of buffoonery — a quaint throwback to the petit-bourgeois socialism dismissed in the Manifesto as “reactionary and Utopian”[38] — were it not for the widespread support it enjoys in anti-capitalist circles today. The idyllic past it portrays is, of course, a fiction. Family farming has since the 1970s become fetishized by the “small is beautiful” Left, roughly around the same time as family-owned farms began to go extinct (transformed into subsidiaries of large-scale agribusiness). Leftish urbanites and self-proclaimed student radicals today often see in traditional agriculture the vestiges of a simple, honest, and upright way of life that has otherwise been lost in modern times. Seldom is it remembered that in former times the provincial homestead was a bastion of conservatismand bulwark of the ancien régime, home to ignorance, illiteracy, patriarchy, superstition, and the domestic slavery of women.[39] Not for nothing did Marx and Engels contemptuously refer to it as a haven for “the idiocy of rural life.”[40]…
In the absence of any viable future, the gaze of all humanity turns impotently toward the past. What emerges from such inauspicious times as these is thus a renovated passéism, in which the only imaginable society other than the one which presently endures must be seen as reminiscent of its earlier incarnations.[41] Instead of forging a way forward into the great unknown, into an as-yet-unseen social formation, the only path that presently seems feasible for humanity is to flee into the familiar comfort of a new dark age. Even Ajl’s “Planet of Fields” is just one step removed from Zerzanite primitivism. To their credit, Mohandesi and Haider explicitly reject this latter-day Neo-Luddism,[42] reasserting the openness of the present. Ajl, by contrast, addresses the primitivists’ challenge only en passant, obliquely brushing it aside on the grounds that nomadic hunter-gatherer society could never support a large population.[43] And yet the Zerzanites can be said to possess at least one undeniable, if somewhat dubious, merit — the extreme lucidity with which they express their madness.
The post continues developing its critique of Bifo and gestures towards some alternative orientations to the past and future. What I want to push, though, is the point that various forms of “post-futurist” romanticisms have become the default mode for anti-capitalism today, pervading the #Occupy movement, for example. While the critique of this sort of romantic anti-capitalism is well developed on the Marxish left (see e.g. 3WF), the important messages is that that some apparently Marxist anti-capitalisms (Ajl is above all an anti-imperialist) are also mired in the “post-futurist” romance.
Also read: Ben Lear on lifeboat communism.
Jamie Patel of the publication Notes, run by students at Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, approached me about contributing a piece for the publication. A worthy endeavor, methinks. A journal of theory, creative writing, and poetry, Notes caters to a market that has up to this point been sorely neglected on campus: critical thought and investigation, accepting and promoting “anything that involves and would stimulate original thought.” In the meantime, Jamie has been kind enough to re-blog my recent post “Memories of the Future.” My own tastes incline me away from much of the post-Henri Lefebvre French theory they discuss on the site, but this is hardly a matter of principle. It is encouraging to see these kinds of initiatives taking shape.
Also, many thanks to my friend Lucas Sutton from London, author of the blog Oscuridades, where Astorian noir is still gestating, for his thoughtful notes and comments in response to the post.
I now have a Tumblr account. Follow me if you’d like.
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii’s collected works
Воспоминания о будущем.
Повесть
Любимой сказкой четырехлетнего Макси была сказка про Тика и Така. Оседлав отцовское колено, ладонями в ворс пропахнувшего табаком пиджака, малыш командовал:
– Про Така.
Колено качалось в такт маятнику, такающему со стены, и отец начинал:
– Сказку эту рассказывают так: жили-были часы (в часах пружина), а у часов два сына – Тик и Так. Чтобы научить Тика с Таком ходить, часы, хоть и кряхтя, дали себя заводить. И черная стрелка – за особую плату – гуляла с Тик-Таком по циферблату. Но выросли Тик и Так: все им не то, все им не так. Ушли с цифр и с блата – назад не идут. А часы ищут стрелами, кряхтят и зовут: “Тик-Так, Так-Тик, ,Так!” Так рассказано или не так?
И маленький Макс, нырнув головой под полу пиджака, щурился сквозь суконные веки петлицы и неизменно отвечал:
– Не так.
Теплый отцовский жилет дергался от смеха, шурша об уши, сквозь прорезь петлицы видна была рука, вытряхивающая трубку:
– Ну а как же? Я слушаю вас, господин Макс Штерер.
В конце концов, Макс Штерер ответил: но лишь тридцать лет спустя.
Первая попытка вышагнуть из слов в дело относится к шестому году жизни Макса.
Дом, в котором жила семья Штереров, примыкал к горчичным плантам, уходящим зелеными квадратами к далекому изгибу Волги. Однажды – это было июльским вечером – мальчуган не явился к ужину. Слуга обошел вкруг дома, выкрикивая по имени запропастившегося. Прибор Макса за все время ужина оставался незанятым. Вечер перешел в ночь. Отец вместе со слугой отправились на розыски. Всю ночь в доме горел свет. Только к утру беглец был отыскан: у .речной переправы, в десяти верстах от дома. У него был вид заправского путешественника: за спиной кошель, в руках палка, в кармане краюха хлеба и четыре пятака. На гневные окрики отца, требовавшего чистосердечного признания, беглец спокойно отвечал:
– Это не я, а Так и Тик бежали. А я ходил их искать.
Штерер-отец, дав и себе и сыну отъесться и отоспаться, решил круто изменить свою воспитательную методу. Призвав к себе маленького Макса, он заявил, что сказки дурь и небыль, что Так и Тик попросту стук одной железной планки о другую и что стук никуда бегать не может. Видя недоумение в голубых широко раскрытых глазах мальчугана, он открыл стеклянную дверцу стенных часов, снял стрелки, затем циферблат и, водя пальцем по зубчатым контурам механизма, объяснил: гири, оттого что они тяжелые, тянут зубья, зубья за зубцы, а зубцы за зубчики – и все это для того, чтобы мерить время.
Слово “время” понравилось Максу. И когда – два-три месяца спустя – его засадили за букварь, в, е, м, р, я были первыми знаками, из которых он попробовал построить, водя пером по косым линейкам, слово.
Узнав дорогу к шевелящимся колесикам, мальчик решил повторить опыт, проделанный отцом. Однажды, выждав, когда в доме никого не было, он приставил к стене табурет, взобрался на него и открыл часовую дверцу. У самых глаз его мерно раскачивался желтый диск маятника; цепь, натянутая гирею, уходила вверх в темноту и шуршание зубцов. Затем с часами стало происходить странное: когда садились обедать, Штерер-старший, глянув на циферблат, увидел: две минуты третьего. “Поздновато”,- пробурчал он и поспешно взялся за ложку. На новый взгляд, в промежутке между первым и вторым, часы ответили: две минуты пятого. “Что за цум тайфель?44 Неужели мы ели суп два часа?” Штерер-младший молчал, не подымая глаз; когда вставали из-за стола, стрелки достигли пяти минут восьмого, а пока слуга успел сбегать за часовым мастером, жившим поблизости, часы заявили о близости полночи, хотя за окном сияло солнце.
Мастер, явившись на зов, прежде всего снял стрелки и, протянув их маленькому Максу, попросил подержать. Пока он, обнажив механизм, вместе с хозяином осматривал винты и колесики, у напроказившего мальчугана было достаточно времени, чтобы сдернуть крохотный протез на ниточке с короткорукой часовой стрелы. Тщательно все осмотрев и выверив, мастер заявил, что часы в полной исправности и что незачем было его, человека занятого, напрасно беспокоить.
Выведенный из себя Штерер-старший закричал, что своим глазам он верит больше, чем чужим знаниям, и потребовал починить взбесившиеся часы. Мастер, обидевшись в свою очередь, заявил, что если кто и взбесился, то во всяком случае не часы, и что он не намерен тратить время и брать деньги за починку неиспорченного. И, поставив стрелы на место, хлопнул сначала часовой дверцей, затем дверью. И часы, точно довершая издевательство над своим хозяином, вдруг круто изменив ход, стали отстукивать минуты с хронометрической точностью.
Весь остаток дня отец и сын провели, не обмолвившись ни словом. Изредка то тот, то этот с беспокойством поглядывали на циферблат. За окном уже чернела нрчь, когда Макс, преодолевая смущение, подошел к отцу и, притронувшись к его колену, сказал:
– Про Така.
И легенда о Тике и Такс, изгнанная было из штерерского дома, возвратилась восвояси. Штерер-младший, производя свой первый опыт, заставил часовые стрелки поменяться осями: минутную на часовую – часовую на минутную. И он мог убедиться, что даже такая простая перестановка нарушает ход психических механизмов.
Вытянув руку, экспериментатор потрогал одну из стрел – ту, что покороче. Другая уводила свое длинное черное острие вверх. Необходимо было обследовать и ее. Привстав на цыпочки, он дотянулся. Над головой что-то хрустнуло, а в пальцах у него чернел отломавшийся кончик стрелы. Как быть? Из шва курточки топорщилась черная нитка. Через минуту отломавшийся кончик был аккуратно привязан к ближайшему острию. Правда, короткая стрелка от этого стала длинной, а длинная короткой,- но не все ли равно. В это время по коридору шаги. Мальчуган захлопнул дверцы часов, спрыгнул и оттащил табурет на место.
Старые терпеливые цюрихские часы не рассердились на любознательного мальчугана, повредившего им их черный палец. Безустанно шагая из угла в угол на своей длинной ноге внутри своей тюремно-тесной стеклянной клетки, они снисходительно разрешали паре детских глаз посещать себя в своем настенном одиночестве. Размеренно отчеканивая секунды, механический учитель из Цюриха, как и большинство учителей, был напружен, точен и методичен. Но гений и не нуждается в том, чтобы его учили фантазии; страдая от своей чрезмерности, он ищет у людей лишь одного – меры. Таким образом преподаватель и ученик вполне подходили друг к другу. Всякий раз, когда за стеной захрапит послеобеденным храпом отец, Штерер-младший, придвинув табурет к проблеме времени, начинал свои расспросы. Он тянул учителя за гири, ощупывал ему его круглое белое лицо, пробирался пытливыми пальчиками внутрь его жесткого и колючего мозга. И однажды случилось так, что механический учитель – очевидно, озадаченный каким-то трудным вопросом вдруг свесил ногу и перестал отчеканивать урок. Макс, полагая, что часы обдумывают ответ, терпеливо дожидался, стоя на табурете. Молчание длиннилось. Стрелы застыли на белом диске. Из-за зубцов – ни звука и ни призвука. Испуганный ребенок, спрыгнув наземь, бросился к спящему отцу; теребя его за свесившийся рукав, он, сквозь всхлипы, бормотал:
– Папа, часы умерли. Но я не виноват.
Отец, стряхнув с себя просонье, зевнул и сказал:
– Что за вздор. Умереть – это не так просто, успокойся, мальчик: они испортились. Только и всего, и мы их починим. А плачут только девочки.
Тогда будущий мастер длительностей, вытерев кулачками глаза, спросил:
– А если испортится время – мы его тоже починим?
Отцу, следуя примеру старых часов, пришлось замолчать. Распрямившись, он с некоторым беспокойством оглядывал свое порождение. Continue reading
Riffing on some lines from the inimitable Owen Hatherley:
Erase the traces.
Narkomfin building, designed by Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis (1929)
Destroy, in order to create.
Hallway inside Narkomfin building, photo by Liza Dedova (February 2011)
Build a new world on the ruins of the old.
Hallway of Narkomfin, photo by Max Semakov (April 2009)
This, it is often thought, is the Modernist imperative, but what of it if the new society never emerged?
Narkomzem building, designed by Aleksei Shchusev, Dmitrii Bulgakov, Iosif Frantsuz, Grigorii Yakovlev; photo by Max Semakov (April 2009)
We have been cheated out of the future, yet the future’s ruins lie about us, hidden or ostentatiously rotting.
NCSR, Commissariat of Communications, designed by Ivan Fomin (1928-1931); photo by Max Semakov (April 2009)
So what would it mean, then, to look for the future’s remnants?
Tsentrosoiuz building, designed by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, and Nikolai Kolli (1928-1933), photo by Max Semakov (April 2009)
To uncover clues about those who wanted, as Walter Benjamin put it, to “live without traces”?
Souvenir of the Crystal Palace (built 1851, destroyed by fire 1936)
Can we, should we, try and excavate utopia?
Before proceeding, it is helpful to contrast Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History with treatments of liberal thought carried out by two other noteworthy leftists — the Slovenian Marxist critic Slavoj Žižek and the French anarcho-syndicalist philosopher Jean-Claude Michéa. Žižek’s stature within the world of radical theory has risen to such heights over the last decade that he no longer requires much in the way of an introduction. Michéa, by contrast, is a relative unknown outside of his native France. Still, his political orientation is so heterodox that it strikes readers of nearly any origin as eccentric. Many of Michéa’s critics (and even his supporters) have suggested that he has made a career out of publicly airing his heterodox views and counterintuitive observations.[162] Michéa understands his own work to be following in the footsteps of George Orwell, whom he has described as a “Tory anarchist” — or conservative anti-authoritarian. And while Žižek and Michéa may be polar opposites, ideologically speaking, a side-by-side review of their writings about liberalism has the decided advantage of the authors’ past exchanges with one another on the subject. In his 2007 (translated 2009) book, The Realm of Lesser Evil: An Essay on Liberal Civilization, Michéa picks up on a few of Žižek’s musings regarding the false permissiveness of the postwar liberal household.[163] Returning the favor, Žižek spends a few pages in the opening chapter of his 2010 work Living in the End Times summarizing Michéa’s thesis about the logical inseparability of political and economic liberalism.[164]
Žižek and Michéa each explore facets of historical liberalism that Losurdo leaves out of his narrative — e.g., “the dramatic wars that defined the everyday horizon of human lives throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”[165] The religious wars raging throughout Europe during this period together constituted one of liberal ideology’s chief formative experiences. In a 2004 interview with Dianna Dilworth for The Believer, Žižek expressed his appreciation for early liberalism’s response to this challenge:
[O]riginally [liberalism] was not an arrogant attitude, but…was quite a modest, honest attitude of confronting the problem of religious tolerance after the Thirty Years’ War. In the seventeenth century, all of Europe was in a shock, and then out of this traumatic experience, the liberal vision came. The idea was that each of us has some existential or religious beliefs, but even if these are our fundamental commitments, we will not be killing each other for them. To create a coexistent social structure, a space where these inherently different commitments can be practiced…I don’t see anything inherently bad in this project.[166]
Though more traditional wars between rival kingdoms and principalities did not all of a sudden end, Michéa explains that this new kind of religious conflict — the French Wars of Religion, the first phase of the Thirty Years’ War, the English Civil War, etc. — now formed their “permanent background,” as a consistent frame of reference. Liberalism, in Michéa’s and Žižek’s understanding, came out of this context.[167] “Fear of violent death, distrust towards those around, rejection of all ideological fantasies, and the desire for a life that would at last be quiet and peaceful [shaped] the historical horizon of the new ‘way of being’ that the moderns would now incessantly demand,” explains Michéa. “It is fundamentally one and the same thing, in their eyes, to establish a society in conformity with the progress of Reason, and to define the conditions that would finally enable humanity to emerge from war.”[168] In this interpretation, liberalism originally represented an attempt to find an escape hatch, a way out of the cycle of religious conflict. Michéa even contends that this atmosphere of generalized civil war lay behind Hobbes’ depiction of the state of nature as the bellum omnium contra omnes.[169]
In their sympathetic retelling of the origins of liberal tolerance out of the turmoil of the Reformation, Žižek and Michéa capture a dimension that is nowhere to be found in Losurdo’s account. Oppositely, however, the first two miss one of the Italian thinker’s most original insights concerning bourgeois society, regarding the intricate entanglement of emancipation and dis-emancipation at work in its historical unfolding. But Michéa is to be preferred when it comes to differentiating the truly revolutionary quality of early liberalism from its later, reactionary form. He almost seems to have Losurdo in mind, then, when he points out a common anachronism committed by leftists today in talking about liberalism: “As against the absurd idea, particularly widespread on the Left, that liberal policies are by nature ‘conservative’ or ‘reactionary’ (classifications, moreover, that by an irony of History [Hegel] go back to Benjamin Constant), it is appropriate to see liberalism as the modern ideology par excellence.”[170] Michéa immediately picks up on the confused temporality at work in the attempt to go back and retrospectively brand classical liberal thought as having somehow been “conservative” all along. He accuses those who attempt such a maneuver of harboring “a particular interest in maintaining the fiction of a left anti-liberalism.”[171] Commenting upon the debasement of liberal politics, he thus confidently asserts (paraphrasing Hegel’s famous remark)[172] that “if Adam Smith or Benjamin Constant were to return today — an event that might well raise the level of political debate considerably — they would find it very difficult to recognize the rose of their liberalism in the cross of the present.”[173]
Besides his knack for exposing such errors in reflective judgment, Michéa displays impressive perspicacity in noticing the relationship of liberalism to the Marxist political project. Deferring to the expertise of two towering figures in the history of political Marxism, he reminds his readers in a footnote that “Lenin did not hesitate to locate Marx in an intellectual continuity with Smith and Ricardo,” and that his onetime-ally Kautsky had before him “already made Marx the direct heir of ‘English economic science,’ i.e. of original liberalism.”[174] As Michéa therefore argues,
beneath its radical appearance, [the] “materialist” [Marxist] fashion of viewing things represents no more than a rigorous systemization of the essential postulates of the modern imaginary (already partly effected, moreover, by Adam Smith). And it was certainly not by chance that the different discourses that today celebrate capitalist globalization, held to be inevitable and eliminating all conceivable barriers to the sway of a unified world market, all rest on the idea that the future of humanity can only be read on the basis of the compulsions of economic growth, itself dependent on the ceaseless advance of “new technologies.”[175]
If Michéa is better than Losurdo at unpacking the historical interconnections between Marxism and liberalism, however, it is only because his politics are far worse. It is not hard to infer from the tone of the passage just cited that Michéa is profoundly ambivalent to the path charted by liberal modernity. Insofar as most of the socialist currents inspired by Marx have sought to overcome capitalist society on the basis of capitalism itself, he sees them as merely an extension of the outworn liberal logic of “progress.”[176] To his credit, Michéa regards the initial impulse that lay behind this modern belief — i.e., that social conditions could be continuously improved over time — as expressing a legitimate “desire to escape at all costs…the hell of ideological civil war.”[177] Nevertheless, to his mind, the obstinate adherence to this vision of limitless growth in the present is untenable (or “unsustainable,” to use the term currently in vogue). Michéa therefore chastises Marx and Engels for failing to recognize “the ecological limits that any project of unlimited economic growth would inexorably come up against.”[178]
At this point, Michéa unfortunately lapses into a rather shallow form of moralism. In this respect, he is not all that far removed from another Orwellian critic of “lesser evilist” politics: the late Christopher Hitchens.[179] Whereas Hitchens culturally “broke left” in the aftermath of 9/11 — promoting atheism, secularism, and rationality — Michéa has turned to the right. He heaps scorn upon anything and everything that he takes to be emblematic of the depravity and licentiousness of modern life, denouncing them as “contrary to good sense and common decency.”[180] Sexual impropriety, obesity, veganism/vegetarianism, and recreational drug use are only a few of the many examples of “indecency” attracting the French philosopher’s ire.[181] Lamenting the rapid disintegration of traditional “values” and “moral scruples” to capitalism’s unremitting forward march, Michéa announces that he intends “to undemonize the concepts of ‘tradition,’ ‘customs,’ [and] ‘roots.’”[182] As anarchists go, he is fairly blasé about the personal autonomy and individual rights usually associated with the rise of the modern bourgeois social subject. Michéa openly objects to “the capitalist lifestyle and its narcissistic individualism,”[183] which erode “preexisting moral and cultural possibilities.”[184] In one of his most reactionary moments, he even expresses his regret at the breakup of the traditional family structure, and its replacement by the individual as the basic economic unit of society. He complains of the reduction of conventional bonds of consanguinity to relationships of mere contract,[185] disdaining the way “[t]he bourgeoisie has torn the pathetic veil of sentiment from family relations and reduced them to purely monetary ones,” as Marx and Engels put it.[186]
Here Michéa drinks from the same trough of pro-family, anti-individualist tripe that reactionaries have been peddling for over two centuries now. The counterrevolutionary Catholic author Louis de Bonald, reviewing Germaine de Staël’s Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution, thus found her criticisms of republicanism wanting in this respect, feeling they did not cut deep enough. While de Staël was fiercely opposed to Jacobinism and its terroristic excesses, she certainly did not pine for a return to the ancien régime, the prerevolutionary past so beloved by de Bonald. She denounced “compulsory service, such as that of the corvée,and other relicts of feudal barbarism,” as she called them. De Bonald also took the liberal De Staël to task for railing against “the threefold fetters of an intolerant church, a feudal nobility, and an unlimited monarchy.”[187] In a xenophobic fit, he alleged that she made too many concessions to England and “her happy and liberal fatherland,” Genoa.[188] As de Bonald saw it, liberal individualism had slowly (but undeniably) undermined the traditional authority of the family. “Republics, particularly the English one, only count individuals,” the French royalist wrote in 1818. “The French monarchy saw only families. The result is that there is more movement and agitation in republics, and more stability and repose in our monarchy.”[189]
The mid-19th century critic and völkisch theorist Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl expressed a similar feeling of disquiet when it came to the liberal argument favoring the primacy of the individual over the primacy of the family. In his 1855 work on The Natural History of the German People, Riehl contended that constitutional liberalism gravely endangered the fundamental integrity of the family unit. Whereas Hegel taught that the modern state represented the apotheosis of freedom and rationality, over and above the spheres of the family and civil society,[190] Riehl reversed this order: the family, and not the private realm of civil society or the public realm of the state, was the only site where the antinomies of modern existence could be resolved. (The contrast between Riehl’s reversal and Marx’s reversal of the Hegelian schema in the Philosophy of Right is illuminating: Marx saw the only way to overcome the irrationality of capitalism as the creation of a classless society, in which institutions such as the family and the state could then be abolished).[191] “Taken to its extreme, a constitutional state would have to lead to a loosening of marriage laws in theory and to the gradual disavowal of the home in practice,” Riehl warned. “The state, as a mere legal agency, recognizes only individual persons — citizens. It disregards the natural, historical factor of a collective folk personality, which manifests itself to us in those two mighty organisms, society and the family, that have been ennobled by the moral force of historic traditions.”[192]
Michéa stands on essentially the same ground as Riehl and de Bonald, however, when he looks to derive the practices of “sharing” and “reciprocity” from traditional structures, hoping to thereby offset the selfishness and “egoism” of liberal bourgeois society. “It is [only by] moving upwards from the specific forms of local (or ‘territorialized’) life, and the one-on-one dealings that come with it (what Alain Caillé calls ‘primary sociality,’ of which family life is a major part) that the elementary structures of reciprocity [might] be put into place.”[193] Indeed, against this Stirnerian egoism, Michéa is forced to invoke the intellectually flaccid Orwellian notion of “the common decency of ‘ordinary people.’”[194] The utility of this notion, he claims, consists in its remaining a “deliberately vague and imprecise concept.” Michéa hints from time to time, however, that this common decency “results from a continual work of humanity on itself in order to radicalize, internalize, and universalize these underlying human virtues expressed in the aptitudes to give, receive, and assist.”[195] He later enlarges on this idea of “human virtues,” defining them as “psychological and cultural dispositions to generosity and fidelity.”[196] Now and then Michéa tries to provide his refurbished, latter-day aretaic vision with an anthropological foundation, rooted in Marcel Mauss’ classic exposition of primitive gift economies.[197] The traditional societies Mauss observed in his 1925 piece, he argued, were governed by the reciprocal logic of “give and take” rather than the selfish logic (or “icy waters”) of “egoistic calculation.”[198] Given his anarchist sensibilities and the emphasis he places on the anthropological study of the gift, it might superficially appear that Michéa is close to another high-profile anarchist author and anthropologist, David Graeber. Over the course of the last decade or so, Graeber has explored pre-monetary gift-giving practices in his anthropological work.[199] This scholarly focus is loosely related to his involvement in the anti-/alter-globalization movement, rooted as it was in principles of direct action and the creation of prefigurative political models. Conversely, Michéa was unimpressed by anti-/alter-globalization politics, and did nothing to support it.[200] Moreover, unlike Graeber, Michéa withholds his endorsement of the direct action championed by these politics,[201] preferring “Chinese cultural traditions that privilege indirect action on the conditions of a political process rather than the methodical forcing of the process itself.”[202]
In the last instance, Michéa’s argument that liberal civilization was founded upon a pessimistic view of human nature, which subsequently gave way to arrogant optimism, is unconvincing. The narrative arc he describes between liberalism’s initial self-consolation as “the realm of lesser evil” and its final self-congratulation as “the best of worlds” does not hold up under cross-examination.[203] Riffing on Gramsci’s famous dictum, Michéa categorically maintains that “[o]riginal liberalism was…marked by a pessimism of the intellect”[204] — “a radical distrust of the moral capacities of human beings.”[205] With such philosophers as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Mandeville, Voltaire, Hume, and Helvétius, this statement may indeed be true. The same cannot be said for authors like Cumberland, Locke, Hutcheson, Rousseau, or Condorcet, however. Classical liberal discourse allowed for a diversity of viewpoints regarding human nature. As it happens, the concept Michéa relies upon to ward off the pessimism he ascribes to liberal thought, “common decency,” is likewise an inheritance of Enlightenment liberalism. In fact, the entire Scottish school of common sense philosophy — typified by Reid, Ferguson, Stewart, and Hamilton — followed their predecessors Shaftesbury and Hutcheson in their liberal optimism. Reid, the progenitor of this school, even speculated that shortly after infancy an individual’s “reasoning and moral faculties…unfold themselves by degrees; so that it is inspired with the various principles of common sense.”[206] The concept of a “common decency” basic to all mankind had already been a part of everyday parlance for several decades by then, antedating its philosophical formalization by Reid. The periodical Common Sense: The Englishman’s Journal (1738) invoked the notion on a number of occasions. Its French equivalent, civilité ordinaire, appeared often in the writings of the great liberal skeptic Pierre Bayle, including his groundbreaking 1695 Historical and Critical Journal.[207]
Continue to Living in the End Times and the salvation of liberalism: Slavoj Žižek
For a host of reasons, Žižek is not able to do full justice to the program suggested by the title of his essay, that only “communism” (that is, the Left) can save bourgeois-liberal democracy. Though accurate, this broader point is lost in his focus on the twilight of the welfare state. Despite their historic rivalry, the projects of liberalism and socialism were always bound up with one another. At its best, the latter saw itself as a continuation of the former. The founding insight of socialism was that liberalism had failed to live up to the standards it set for itself. In the words of Neil Davidson, the greatest socialists have thus fought “for those universal principles of freedom and justice which the bourgeois revolutions brought onto the historical agenda but, for all their epochal significance, were unable to achieve.”[226] Because liberalism fell short of its own ideals, socialism has been charged with the task of their realization. Precisely this, and nothing else, is what Marx meant when he stated in 1871 that the proletarian movement has “no ideals [of its own] to realize, but to set free elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant.”[227] Engels, challenging the moth-eaten liberalism of François Guizot, therefore rebuked the aging minister in 1850 for his revisionist account of the English Revolution. Guizot had opportunistically contrasted the unhurried gradualism of social and political transformation in England with the violent convulsions that would later take place in France. As Engels was eager to point out, however, the origin of these French revolutionary ideals could be found in the writings of the British liberals. “M. Guizot forgets that freethinking, which so horrifies him in the French Revolution, was brought to France from no other country than England,” Engels asserted. “Locke was its father, and with Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke it assumed that keen-spirited form [that] subsequently developed so brilliantly in France. We thus arrive at the odd conclusion that freethinking on which, according to M. Guizot, the French Revolution foundered, was one of the most essential products of the ‘religious’ English Revolution.”[228]
To put it in the starkest terms imaginable, the advent of socialism would at the same time entail the liberation of liberalism from the unresolved contradictions in which it is still enmeshed to this day. This is what would be required of the proletariat, by acting “[i]n the full consciousness of [its] historic mission,…in order for it to work out [its] own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending.”[229] The Left must therefore not only oppose liberalism, but in a sense it must also thereby transpose liberalism by adopting this oppositional stance. Accordingly, the proletariat must not only negate bourgeois society, but in a sense also complete bourgeois society through this very act of negation. The path to overcoming liberal ideology, like the capitalist mode of production on which it is based, must be pursued in and through bourgeois society itself. It is impossible to stand at some kind of Archimedean remove, outside of one’s moment in history. Along these same lines, Lenin already wrote in 1920 that “[c]apitalism could have been declared — and with full justice — to be ‘historically obsolete’ many decades ago, but that [has] not at all remove[d] the need for a very long and very persistent struggle on the basis of capitalism.”[230]
Continue to Socialism or Barbarism?
The decline of the Left over the course of this last century is thus not only a tragedy for those who fought on its behalf, but also for those who traditionally fought against it. Inasmuch as proletarian socialism aimed at the supersession of bourgeois liberalism, its old nemesis, while simultaneously preserving the latter’s revolutionary accomplishments and raising them to a “higher level,” the former stood for the hope of all humanity — no matter which side one was on. For as long as it is able to reproduce its own existence, the underlying volatility of capitalist society will remain unchanged (whether or not there is a leftist political project capable of overcoming it). But the idea that capitalism will simply continue to exist indefinitely cannot at all be supported by historical experience. Though bourgeois political economists have time and again tried to naturalize the social relations that have appeared immediately before them, mesmerized by the fetish-character of the commodity form, the capitalist mode of production has not always existed. It came into existence historically, and could just as easily pass out of existence historically.[231] The issue thus comes down to ascertaining the nature of this historical passage, should it ever arrive at all. Capitalist society could cease to exist in any number of ways, the majority of which would not be emancipatory in the least. This might well be the most disturbing prospect of all: that capitalism will collapse and still not lead to a more just, liberated, and equitable society. As Lukács pointed out, commenting on the revolutionary legacies of Lenin and Luxemburg, “socialism would never happen ‘by itself,’ and as the result of an inevitable natural economic development. The natural laws of capitalism do indeed lead inevitably to its ultimate crisis, but at the end of its road would be the destruction of all civilization and a new barbarism.”[232] Broadly speaking, there are two scenarios that can be imagined as leading to capitalism’s eventual demise: 1.) cataclysm or 2.) revolution.
In either case, the result would be that capital would no longer exist. The reason for this would be quite different from instance to instance, however. Should the former take place, capital would be dissolved simply because it would no longer be able to reproduce and augment its own value through the process of production. For example, a war could break out that would be of such devastating proportions that the cycles of production and circulation would be fatally disrupted. Some of the images called to mind are total blight, scorched earth, and nuclear holocaust. Another possibility would be some sort of global environmental catastrophe. Should the latter (revolution) obtain, however, capital would be dissolved because human production would no longer be subordinated to its ends. Humanity would not produce goods simply to extract surplus-value from labor and then be realized on the market, only to repeat this cycle all over again, in perpetuity. Rather, humanity would produce in order to meet (and surpass) human needs, in a way that does not endanger the provision of such needs in the future. In this scenario, society would not undertake production for the sake of a category external and alien to itself (capital), but would become its own self-directed end. Society would only produce for the sake of society and its individual members. The mystery of capital — and indeed the riddle of all history[233] — is that society is a product of human activity, and yet appears to humanity as an unruly force of nature.[234] Crises are experienced under the capitalist social order as so many natural disasters, as storms to “weather” or endure. Humanity is, nonetheless, the unconscious demiurge of this second nature. It has but to attain consciousness in order to decisively act and thereby claim this system for itself, so that society and its constituent individuals might someday live autonomously. As Engels once put it:
With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer…The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face-to-face with man as laws of Nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man’s own social organization, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by Nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action…It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.[235]
Faced with the polarity dividing freedom and humanity on the one hand from unfreedom and inhumanity on the other, society arrived at a historic impasse almost a century ago. Since this time it appears to have remained at a virtual standstill, stuck before this fork in the road. This apparent immobility must not be thought of as an absolute motionlessness, however, qua an absolute cessation of motion or activity. At best, civilization has merely been spinning its wheels for the last hundred years; at worst, it has politically regressed. The choice presently at hand poses afresh Luxemburg’s old disjunction of “socialism or barbarism.”[236] But make no mistake about it: these options do not present themselves as on an empty slate. Liberalism has been utterly barbaric for over 150 years now. But the attempts to go beyond it during this time, the many faces of “actually existing socialism,” have been similarly barbarized and enervated. The twentieth century, Richard Rubin has pointed out, revealed the nightmarish possibility of having both socialism and barbarism, embodied its most characteristic and grotesque form as Stalinism.[237] A pair of related, if troubling, questions now makes an appearance. What if liberal civilization still provides the basis for the best (or least worst) of all possible worlds that humanity can realistically hope for? This is, at least in Michéa’s opinion, how it has often understood itself.[238] And, assuming that liberalism does in fact provide this basis, what if the best (or least worst) of all possible worlds thus established proves impossible to maintain?
This is the prospect raised by Žižek, amongst others, as the specter of ecological and thermonuclear Armageddon continues to haunt contemporary social life.[239] In one of his more bombastic books of late, In Defense of Lost Causes, Žižek summarizes this current state of affairs more succinctly. “What looms on the horizon today is the unprecedented possibility that [a calamity] will intervene directly into the historical Substance,” projects Žižek, “catastrophically disturbing its course by triggering an ecological catastrophe, a fateful biogenetic mutation, a nuclear or similar military-social catastrophe, and so on…It no longer holds that, whatever we do, history will carry on.”[240] Since the 1970s and the emergence of the environmental movement, many leftists fear that an impending natural disaster will render the Earth uninhabitable, effectively bringing an end to the drama of human history. Other critics of a Marxist persuasion, such as Fredric Jameson, count no fewer than “four fundamental threats to the survival of the human race today,” throwing global impoverishment and famine as well as structural unemployment into the mix along with ecological collapse and nuclear war. He immediately adds, correctly, the humbling fact that “in each of these areas no serious counterforce exists anywhere in the world.”[241] Yet it would seem to be of paramount importance that such counterforces eventually arise so that humanity can continue to exist at all — let alone realize its deepest aspirations of liberty and equality. Despite capitalism’s much-vaunted “adaptability,” the liberal belief in the self-correcting capacity of the Market seems a dangerous game to play, a concern voiced in recent decades by the Marxian anthropologist Maurice Godelier.[242] For now, at least, liberalism clearly offers no way out. With the decline of the Left in the twentieth century, however, no socialist alternative seems readily available. That is to say, the need for revolutionary transformation has never been greater, and yet the forces necessary for such a transformation have never been in shorter supply.
Lenin remarked in 1917, of course, that revolutionary ruptures necessarily appear as “miracles” to those who witness them.[243] It is thus perhaps not entirely beyond the realm of possibility that capitalism might still someday be transcended. If liberalism’s original emancipatory potential is ever to be realized, however, it will require a revolutionary act of sublation — in the strict Hegelian sense of a thing’s determinate negation, its concurrent cancellation and preservation.[244] As Chris Cutrone has put it: “Socialism is meant to transcend liberalism by fulfilling it. The problem with liberalism is not its direction, supposedly different from socialism, but rather that it does not go far enough. Socialism is not anti-liberal.”[245] Despite the recalcitrance it has repeatedly shown to efforts aiming to radically transform it, liberalism’s — and, indeed, all of humanity’s — only chance for survival resides with socialism. “In this hour, socialism is the only salvation for humanity,” Rosa Luxemburg proclaimed in 1918. The fundamental truth of this assertion remains equally valid today, however much other conditions have changed. Absent the possibility of its determinate negation, liberalism now instead faces absolute annihilation. Socialism or barbarism? Revolution or cataclysm?
Continue to Revolution into Reaction: June 1848 to August 1914