Bourgeois civilization is sick unto death, and we cells of this organism know it. We clamber for media spectacles depicting the deaths of empires, we turn inward away from the winds of the wasteland, we are stricken by a crisis of faith in all absolutes — even in that old omnipotence, the state. The state lashes out with the brutishness we have come to expect where its representation of society to society becomes tenuous. The turn of bureaucracy to militarism is a means of self-preservation, by obscuring the cold and calculating rationalism of the modern state in the fiery passion of bloodshed and national war. But such mobilization also signifies defeat and the self-negation of sociality.
The prime example of this today is that little piece of the West, Israel, which is now conducting a Holocaust of Palestinians. Its total mobilization for extermination has blasted apart its diplomatic gains and the normal function of Israeli consumer capitalism. Meanwhile, the United States, its prime sponsor, is as decrepit and barren of a will to live (and therefore adapt) as the walking corpse that serves as its Presidential faith. The world arrangement represented by these two states is destroying its very foundations, as always.
The machine of “Humanity” aches and turns, powered with the mutilated flesh of the earth. Its gears go without lubrication, its maintenance crew is rushed in a perpetual speedup of the prevailing techniques. One shouldn’t expect innovation here, but the grinding clash of contradictions which spark into an apocalyptic explosion. This is appears as the age of an absolute end, whether by ecological collapse or nuclear hellfire. But the absolute end itself implies something absolutely new, the glimmer of a new beginning. The world must end before it can begin anew.
The Self-Same
“Beware! The time approaches when human beings no longer launch the arrow of their longing beyond the human, and the string of their bow will have forgotten how to whir! I say to you: one must still have chaos in oneself in order to give birth to a dancing star. I say to you: you still have chaos in you. Beware! The time of the most contemptible human is coming, the one who can no longer have contempt for himself. Behold! I show you the last human being.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883)¹
The desire for self-identity is a desire for death. It is a desire to be done with the whole business of living, and to finally come to the end of one’s organic life. To finally be defined is to be sliced up into a dead, dried thing. Identity functions like the torture-execution machine of Kafka’s “The Penal Colony” (1919), which carves the law prisoners are accused of breaking into their flesh and kills them just as it finishes its defining operation.
The little men of today think they want to be more. To them, this “more” is capital, which needs “more” evermore. They consider their capital, actual or fantasy, as a personification of their Selves. In actuality, the capitalist mode of production tends to render the self as a personification of their capital’s functions. That is the meaning of being a good businessman. And the little men are especially attentive to these capital-ethics, aware as they are of the precarity of their capital-selves compared to the big bourgeoisie which need not concern themselves with the management of their capital.
These little men were described by Friedrich Engels in 1850:
“[…]this class is invariably full of bluster and loud protestations, at times even extreme as far as talking goes, as long as it perceives no danger; faint-hearted, cautious and calculating as soon as the slightest danger approaches; aghast, alarmed and wavering as soon as the movement it provoked is seized upon and taken up seriously by other classes; treacherous to the whole movement for the sake of its petty-bourgeois existence as soon as there is any question of a struggle with weapons in hand — and in the end, as a result of its indecisiveness, more often than not cheated and ill-treated as soon as the reactionary side has achieved victory.”²
What classical Marxism recognized in a class — namely, a lack of a definitive class stand flittering to and fro between bourgeoisie and proletariat, the Owners and the Ownless Labor — is now characteristic of bourgeois civilization as a whole. Everyone is now a petit-bourgeois, because almost everyone is now a proletarian. “The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process,” (Walter Benjamin).³ There has been a leveling into the average, just as the more naive socialists hoped for, but it still has its hills and valleys in the rich and poor. Rich and poor are not classes, they are the two poles of a single mass. They are not the radical (self-)contradiction of capital and labor.
But the proletarian remains as the underside of this flat masa-ified mud pie. In a sense, we live in a classless society — but it is a classless class society. Through fragmentation, atomization, and flexibilization, capital has secured its political dominance over and access to labor. It does what it may, disposing of workers who find themselves helpless insofar as they appear as strictly separable owners of their labor-power — as disembodied owners of their own bodily capacities — on the market.
Fascism emerged to defeat the revolutionary upheavals of the workers by wielding the instrument of imperialist repression and the engine of its own mass-revolutionary faith. It sought to purify capitalism of the liberal bourgeoisie in order to construct a society organically united in a hymn to work and war against difference. Though the bourgeoisie did not summon fascism into history, it did tend to make common cause with it where social revolution might rear its head. Fascism was promoted as a new reconciliation of classes in a national program of renewal — the Self-Same people’s community would reach towards a realization… of its Self.
The historian David Schoenbaum described the Nazi program as “a society that was New Deal and good old days at the same time.”⁴ A resonance sounds from the American New Deal itself, which Michael Joseph Roberto has described as directly influenced by Italian fascism and laying the groundwork for a potential American fascist state.⁵ After World War II, fascism did not disappear from the world stage with the Axis. In the words of comedian George Carlin, “Germany lost the second World War, fascism won it.”⁶ Bourgeois society integrated the historical experience of fascism into new regimes of accumulation and administration. Fascism survived, even within liberal democratic states.
Classical fascism was the counterpart and consequence of the world-historical defeat of the international communist proletariat in the 1920s, which failed to spread the Russian Revolution. The re-emergence of fascism today has its origins in the pre-emptive counterrevolution in the 1970s, reacting especially against the (quickly exhausted) energy of 1968.⁷ The world proletariat of the ’70s was for the most part docile compared to the ’20s, although the struggle against value continued to rage in autonomous politics. The fragmentation of mass society in the ’70s, conducted especially through the destruction of trade unions, social welfare, and inflexible forms of capitalist production gutted the possibility for mass revolutionary politics as well.
Yet this has affected revolutionary reactionaries alongside revolutionary communists. Since the 1990s there has been a slow emergence from out of the decay of the masses of new forms of fascism. These rely heavily on internet spectacle for their circulation and coordination, and tend far more than classical fascism to act through sporadic acts of terror such as mass shootings. These conditions of fragmented massification, where everyone is the same in their inward-facing mediocrity, lend themselves in particular to the self-negation of the liberal exchange-principle into the fascist ache for the Triumph of the Will. Yet the fascism of today is less hopeful than ever of a break with the liberal state, even when it promises a spiritual and civilizational overcoming more thoroughgoing than any of the classical fascist mass movements. Fascists merely move to return to the old bureaucratic-managerial state, or to diffuse fascism within and beyond the liberal national state’s formal confines like a miasma. This is a fascism adapted for a classless class society which has been ground up into a paste of automaton-grains.
The characteristics of the Last Man are also the characteristics of fascism. The fascists seek to pass over class antagonisms into class collaboration, into the united Will of the national-state, in order to forge the horde. It hopes to make warriors out of this horde, but it can only expect the same mediocrity and selfishness characteristic of liberalism. Once these mediocre horde-grains find fascism to depart from their retreat into dead inwardness, they passively turn away from it. They might allow the fascists to carry on unchallenged, but they are dead weight.
The active fascists are little better than these more direct comfort-seekers. They preach the command to “live dangerously,” but regress to the most degraded forms of life. They protest against the decadence of bourgeois civilization while engaging in the pettiest moralism. They constantly panic about the challenge to limits and foundations made by capital — in actual fact, the source of its revolutionary historical role.
These fascists are not even entirely the Human of global capitalism, which is a civic subject. They are subhumans, emerging from the repressed depths of the Human. They wish to totally conquer nature — or what is the same, return to it — and yet become a new kind of pathetic mindless ape which is at the mercy of the circumstances it has inherited and made. Where they come to power, they build nothing stable. Despite their complaints about a Jewish “culture of criticism,” they themselves can only destroy without having the vital force to construct anew.
Thus their efforts amount to removing the stabilizing functions of bureaucratic liberalism, leaving only the overheated engine of instrumental rationality. Seeking to bypass the legal order of recognition, they stumble stupidly into total warfare, reducing others to bare life at the cost of reducing themselves into mere functions of a cannibal society. This is the Man-society which lives by the blood of Men. It cultivates them as Last Men in order to devour them into itself, and in order to suppress the new which might live for life instead of live to be eaten up by dead labor.
Their Will results in total conformity stranded on a miniscule shore. “No shepherd, and one herd! Every one wanteth the same; every one is equal: he who hath other sentiments goeth voluntarily into the madhouse,” (Nietzsche).⁸ The fascists realize the homogenization of capitalist abstract labor in trying to counterpose the good-concrete labor-capital against the Jewish-abstract financial capital. Everyone becomes a worker, sure, but the worker who doesn’t give a damn about “the crappy shit he has to make[…]”⁹ The myth of the nation turns into universal disillusionment and the personalism of the Last Man. Life appears to itself as abstracted into a dead thing, living people become instruments — even if they naively think they are instruments of the Will. The concrete cannot be counterposed to the abstract as Freedom. Rather, the abstract is necessary for the differentiation of the concrete and thus for life’s self-conscious self-mastery.
The aspiration for life which dies in the death-worship of fascism is still a potentially dangerous force for bourgeois society. The proletariat has been diffused throughout society along with the Mass. Dispossession has been universalized with the standardization of self-possession. This means that across society there are possibilities of recognizing in communism the cause of life, if only people would give up the dead comfort of the Is. An immanent total rejection of what Is immanent in favor of the Not-Yet. The extremes meet.
The subject of the present subjectless society is the Mass, the Last Man. This offers a negatively inverted mirror image of the Overman. A free association of Overmen would always seek beyond itself and make the decision of living life for life itself, with all the risks and dangers of contradiction and difference.
The Overman Emerges from the Tomb
The petit-bourgeois in traditional Marxism can either throw its weight with the proletariat or bourgeoisie, or it can take up the naive endeavor of recreating society in its own image to secure the existence of itself and a future for its Man-children. This quasi-revolutionary option has only become a self-parody of vitalism with history. The life that fascists seek to assert, by means of destiny and death, declines into ridiculousness along with the empire itself. The Fascist New Man, once holding a rifle and chanting hymns to death, now rides a bugatti and trafficks in flesh. The horde cannot even assert itself as a horde anymore, it now speaks in one voice of individuality as an absolute. It is a horde through its atomism itself, it is indifferent by the fact that each insists that their-Selves have nothing fundamental to do with the other.
The little men try to become New Men, and the New Man ends up being the Last Man. This failure is a necessary lesson. Revolution, really all-round revolution, can only begin from dispossession instead of the absolute foundations of aggrieved interest groups — including the aggrieved Self. Communist revolution appropriates death for life, rendering mutilation and mortality the means for more life instead of a life defined by its death. Instead of destiny, death becomes one of the grinning calaveras of José Guadalupe Posada. Death’s deadness is overcome by the death on the Same rendered by the New, by the burning of the stars of Becoming.
The Self can only be a new beginning if we recognize that it is not the Same. We are not who we are. But this is only doom if we still seek to define our way into Self-Identity, which succeeds only in absolute death. Life does not live without contamination. The split of being and reasoning is necessary for reason. The rational subject must know the world as not its concept, and as only capable of being true to its concept of goodness if the subject works according to its non-identity with itself and with the world. The rationalist need for cohesive totality becomes a subjectivism. This subjectivism becomes the irrational attempt to Act purely and violently by externalizing the Will into a World.
But the world is many, it is irreducible. The world’s living unity cannot be realized by any foundations, even those which claim fealty only to life yet recognize only the life of the Will. The fascist cannot overcome the wavering of the Mass by such means. Communists, on the other hand, transcend this wavering not by standing resolutely but by dancing a new rhythm from out of the old. We need a communism of the wounded, the insane, the fragmented, the pariahs, the exploited, the crucified, the dispossessed. Only the wounded, who are not complete in themselves, can proliferate that manyness as the flourishing of a universal principle of life living life for life itself. Only the survivors know life as a principle which must constantly renew itself by reaching towards new shores and stars. The Overman necessarily appears sick and monstrous to the mediocre and dying old world of the Last Man.
References
[1] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, ed. Adrian del Caro and Robert B. Pippin, trans. Adrian del Caro, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 9.
[2] Friedrich Engels, “The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution,” 1850, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/german-imperial/intro.htm.
[3] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, by Walter Benjamin, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, New York: Schocken Books, 2007), p. 241.
[4] David Schoenbaum, Hitler’s Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933–1939 (New York, New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1967), p. 286.
[5] Michael Joseph Roberto, The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920–1940 (New York, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018), pp. 230–240.
[6] George Carlin, Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO, September 9, 2005), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHn9AWYU0Hg&t=1s.
[7] Loren Goldner, “The Remaking of the American Working Class: The Restructuring of Global Capital and the Recomposition of Class Terrain” (libcom.org, 1999), https://libcom.org/article/1980-remaking-american-working-class-loren-goldner.
[8] Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, p. 10.
[9] Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus, Penguin Classics (New York, New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1973), p. 273.
