blindpig
11-01-2015, 12:21 PM
In search of the Idea ("ideology") of Novorossiya
On October 28, in Moscow, a conference was held in the "search of a party of a new type," organized by the Center for Political Thought and Ideology ("Sulakshin's Center") with the participation of Igor Strelkov.
Besides political, organizational, strategic and tactical questions and others, the key question raised was that of the Idea which can become life and real political power.
This what was said in particular (I am leaving it in the Russian original):
http://rusrand.ru/files/15/10/29/151029090410_IMG_8939.gif
СМИ:
«А по поводу идеологии? Вы же сказали, что такие планы есть?»
Подводя итоги научно-экспертной сессии, генеральный директор Центра Степан Сулакшин заявил, что Центр научной политической мысли и идеологии в научно-экспертном плане исследует проблему грядущей политической трансформации в стране. В частности, сказал:
«Она неизбежна. И отведет страну от пагубного и критически губительного либерального курса, который превратился в официальную программу и политическую линию правящего режима в стране, ее руководства и ее президента Владимира Путина. Эта линия для страны губительна. Поэтому прогноз говорит о том, что в стране обязательно зародятся и сформируются и в какой-то перспективе получат ответственность за ее развитие силы, стоящие на иной ценностной платформе. На платформе, отрицающей расслоение, социальный паразитизм, ослабление государственности, игнорирование цивилизационной идентичности, ценностной основы в государственном управлении.
Это уже фактически формирующаяся новая идеология и новая политическая платформа, которая может в недалекой перспективе лечь в основу формирования новой политической партии в стране. Но не надо понимать ее как еще одну в ряду многих десятков партий, которые зарегистрированы в Министерстве юстиции РФ и играются в игрушки по недобросовестным правилам игры. Надо понимать так, что «партия нового типа» имеет цель преобразования облика страны, а не занятия одного-двух кресел с хорошей стипендией в каком-нибудь Парламенте, и что это сила поставит целью изменение самих правил игры. Важно, что речь идет о законных, мирных и ненасильственных путях трансформации. Поэтому войдут в эту партию люди здоровые, патриотичные, сыны своего Отечества, люди с представлением о праведном, о правильном, и такие в стране есть. Сейчас они поднимают голос, начинают находить друг друга, эта сеть в ближайшие годы вырастет в общественно-политическую силу, и может быть она будет называться и не партией. Главное, что страна должна возродиться, так называемая социальная иммунная система, которая больной организм спасает от чужеродных ему вирусов и бацилл».
So perhaps time has come for me to post here a paper I presented last year in Sweden and which the organizers of the conference, led by Russian ex-pats, then refused to publish because they dismissed it as "propaganda," while they also dubbed Novorossiya and the Russian Mir "imaginary." I have been sitting on the paper then for almost a year. But at last here it is the way it was submitted. Perhaps there is something in it which can strike some cord with those who want and need to formulate the meaning of Russian revival. If this paper ran into undisguised hostility of the (Russian) opponents of Russian Mir, then perhaps the defenders of Russian Mir might find here something of value or interest.
Lessons of a Virtual Activist from the Ukrainian Battles for Eurasia
(The Message Is the Medium, and the Message Is Great Power)
Vladimir Suchan
Paper prepared for
Eurasia 2.0 Conference 2014,
“Post-Soviet Geopolitics in the Age of the New Media”
UCRS Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies
Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden,
3-4 November 2014
“When you say the medium is the message, you’re uttering an obvious contradiction, because normally you reserve the word ‘message’ for the content and ‘medium’ for the container, as it were. … In fact, it doesn’t mean what it appears on the surface, and the trouble with it comes from most people not delving below the surface. … [My father] may have had tongue in cheek … but he was quite precise.”[1]
Eric McLuhan
“The people running the world right now are insane, and the public is sleep walking into a tragedy. If you want to alter the course that we are on, there’s only one way to do it. We have to wake up that public. Even the most powerful weapons of war are neutralized if you reach the mind of the man behind the trigger.”[2]
“Geopolitics of World War III,” SCG News
“In essence, the principal fight for Novorossiya is the battle for hearts, minds, and souls of people. Who wins this principal battle will win the war. In this battle politicians are not playing the main role at all. The main fighters are journalists, artists, and, especially, poets.”[3]
“На самом деле главный бой за Новороссию - это бой за сердца, умы и души людей. Тот, кто выиграет этот главный бой, - выиграет сражение. В этом бою политики играют далеко не главную роль. Главные бойцы - это журналисты, писатели, художники и, безусловно, певцы. И среди многих, Вика Цыганова на передовой.”
Oleg Tzarev, a Novorossiya leader
“Now people understand that it is not necessary to believe in leaders. We don’t need to believe in any Yanukovich, we don’t need to believe in a Party of Regions. We need to organize ourselves by ourselves--and to remember our own history, remember our own culture. That is our foundation. So thank you to all the Banderites who have come into Kiev, and who have made people remember who they are, who they are in the world, and above all why they are here on this earth.”[4]
A man from Kramatorsk
“Something woke up in my soul, and I realized that my place is here, that Russians are my brothers and that their pain is also my pain. I am happy now for my life is becoming meaningful; I am Russian in the spirit now.”[5]
Christien Gillion, a French volunteer with the Army of Novorossiya
“The struggle for Novorossiya is a struggle for hearts, minds, and souls of people. Who wins this principal struggle will win it all.”
“Бой за Новороссию - это бой за сердца, умы и души людей. Тот, кто выиграет этот главный бой, - выиграет сражение.” [6]
Reports from the Militia of Novorossiya
The Medium is the Message
Let’s begin with Marshall McLuhan’s foundational dictum: “The medium is the message.” Great familiarity with this axiom of the media and modern political techniques and its corresponding facile overuse has become a password allowing us to repeat things which we don’t understand or no longer bother to think too much about. But others have already heard it and are familiar with it and, thus, when we say it too, we obtain a nod and are let into the ranks of the familiar spirits and of those who approve of the like as we do.
The statement worthy of a real marshal thus becomes like many other things part of the buzzing noise on our anthill or beehive. The more we clothe ourselves and others in its sound, which is required to produce McLuhan’s sentence, the more its meaning or depth is being worn off together with our own distinctive thinking or consciousness.
McLuhan’s Delphic oracle then becomes a cliché, a notion inversely related to having a clue. Unbeknownst to us, we are thus robbing ourselves of thought, depth, and the key to our own mind. Cliché is from clicher, which is expressive of the action when one is struck—struck by a solid, “stereotype block” or mold—and when, as a result, one becomes a common print, a “trite phrase, worn-out expression.”
Cliché, stereotype, and triviality then belong together and are symptomatic of a common état, condition, or disease. Stereotype is from a French word for a “solid plate of type,” further from Greek stereos that means solid and which sounds perilously close to sterile. The sense of “perpetuated without change [or life]” was followed in 1920 by a notion of something “preconceived and oversimplified.”
Stereotypes and clichés are then figures of mental ossification—of thoughts lacking spark, penetration, originality, insight and truth. If Medusa’s early victims were turned into stone under her terrible gaze, modern man and his mind get comfortably numbed and killed by steady and repetitive doses of trite “truths,” echoed stereotypes, and automatic clichés. When improperly or all too commonly handled, McLuhan’s “Medium is the message” becomes one such petrifaction or a sign of petrifaction, which makes its carrier flat, lifeless and dumb in the face of the terrible and evils.
According to McLuhan himself, the medium and its message is supposed to work as a cliché in order to do its work efficiently: “[As] the new artifact or technology pervades the host culture as a new cliché, it displaces, in the process, the old cliché or homeostasis …”[7] Thus, the media and their messages, whatever they are, including the cliché “The Medium is the Message,” are supposed to “pervade the host” and displace its content, its originality. In other words, we have here a formula for perfect parasitic colonization, that is to say, a figure of Western imperialism and its ideal. The least reflected and understood it is, the more unconscious to the host it is, the more perfectly and efficiently it is supposed to work: “We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies.”[8] That’s also McLuhan.
Interestingly though, the cliché, the superficial and the thoughtless, apparently unleashing its power and flood on the world, also match the otherwise seemingly untranslatable Russian idea of a great sin known as poshlost. As Nakobov explains, it is a systemic normalization and ritualization of dishonesty and a vulgar, promiscuously indiscriminate spirit (an anti-thesis of the spirit, that is):
“Poshlust,” or in a better transliteration poshlost, has many nuances, ... corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudo-literature—these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know. ... The flowers of poshlost bloom in such phrases and terms as “the moment of truth,” “charisma,” “existential” (used seriously), “dialogue” (as applied to political talks between nations), and “vocabulary” (as applied to a dauber). ... One of poshlost’s favorite breeding places has always been the Art Exhibition; there it is produced by so-called sculptors working with the tools of wreckers, building crankshaft cretins of stainless steel, Zen stereos, polystyrene stinkbirds, objects trouvés in latrines, cannonballs, canned balls. There we admire the gabinetti wall patterns of so-called abstract artists, Freudian surrealism, roric smudges, and Rorschach blots—all of it as corny in its own right as the academic “September Morns” and “Florentine Flowergirls” of half a century ago.[9]
Poshlost is the “essence” of dead souls, the new form of spiritual, political, moral, and cultural enslavement in the hands and in the minds of new bourgeois masters, who are themselves the concentration of that anti-quality, which may also be defined as the fake, the false and lacking spirituality (dukhovnost). As Gogol explains: ”[Pushkin] used to say of me that no other writer before me possessed the gift to expose so brightly life’s poshlust, to depict so powerfully the poshlust of a poshlusty man [poshlost’ poshlogo cheloveka] in such a way that everybody’s eyes would be opened wide to all the petty trivia that often escape our attention.”[10]
If poshlost was in Russia identified soon enough as man’s and society’s great disease which needs to be exposed and fought against, in the West, poshlost has become an aggressively demanded and promoted form of bourgeois proper conduct. Though in Russia, the battle against poshlost is said to have ended by the 1960s[11]—that’s when Russia (or the Soviet Union then) became more and more ready for its sell-out by the communists themselves and the return back into the bourgeois and oligarchic fold.
Poshlost, or the ability to think only in phrases and clichés (and, if not, to draw a dead blank), can be seen at work in an interview with a Ukrainian special forces captain from Western Ukraine, which was published by Anna News. “As one listens to the captain, it becomes quickly obvious that he draws upon a store of clichés for all of his thoughts and responses.” When he is put in a spot where no cliché comes to his rescue, he immediately becomes lost for thoughts and words and does not know what to think or what to say. He did acknowledge that Aidar battalion is firmly and openly Nazi, but this gave him no further thought or idea about the fact that he was fighting and killing on the same side with them and under the same high command and leadership. He also understands that his grandfathers were fighting against Nazism, Hitler, and Bandera, but again he cannot formulate or conceive a thought, idea, or opinion about his own fighting and killing for what his grandfathers were fighting against. He went to make war in Donbass because it was an order and because the certainty of prison, if he refused, would be a much greater risk for him than the possibility of dying in Donbass or the certain necessity of killing as ordered. When he is asked about the Odessa massacre, he has no thought or opinion either. He is not from Odessa, he was not there when the massacre or “it” happened, and to form any thought or opinion, he would need to see again pictures. Otherwise, he considers himself a well-educated, thoughtful and thinking man and he is sure that his officer’s honor has not been anyhow impaired. At first, he did now know about the Volyn massacres of the 100,000 Poles by Bandera’s soldiers; then he corrects himself and says that he read a little about it in journals such as “men’s magazine” Maxim so that “he cannot tell anything useful about this information”:
Pictures on TV are true, but the sound [interpretation] is not. … When they show pictures on Ukrainian TV channels, they are showing exactly how it is … To say who started this war is very difficult. It is not a matter of opinion. For this one would need to know a lot of facts. But if one should sort it out, then I believe that Yanukovich started the war. Because students came to Maidan … because Yanukovich was adopting those laws and was robbing people … I have nothing in common with Aidar Battalion … It is hard for me to say anything about Odessa [the Odessa massacre] because I don’t remember a single picture. One would need to see it on the news. Simply I don’t remember pictures showing how it was there. I am not Odessite. I don’t know how it was there, if I had been there, then … Yes, I knew that I was not going [to war] for a walk … I am for equality. … But [as a captain] I was not in command. A sergeant was in charge [of my group], it was not me. I don’t have that qualification. … They say that a blunt pencil is better than a sharp memory; the most important thing is to know where to get information and not to remember it. … What they are showing us that’s what I watch. … To ask me about what separatism means is not a competent question for me, you need to ask Poroshenko or Yatsenyuk … No one can do anything. No one can do anything. … Of courses, losses are everywhere. … But I was not ready to sit in prison [if I refused orders] … [12]
Trivial, commonplace and vulgar, literally means belonging to the crossroads. Trivium is where three roads meet. As a symbol of man’s possible destinies and cardinal choices, the trivial then points not only toward a possible “banality of evil,” but also to a radical devaluation of one’s fate and its meaning—to the danger of falling for exchanging one’s mind for useless information and going down the road of the least resistance by making banal decisions and choices.
A man loaded with phrases, with blocs of phrases that are blocking his mind, loses a great deal of what it means to be homo sapiens, what it means to be alive and well. One certainly becomes adjusted, but adjusted in a very mediated way, which for McLuhan means to be “perfectly adapted to propaganda” and hence to oligarchy or a society of robots:
Propaganda cannot succeed where people have no trace of Western culture. …. [For] to talk about critical faculties and discernment is to talk about something far above primary education and to consider a very small minority. The vast majority of people, perhaps 90 percent, know how to read, but they do not exercise their intelligence beyond this. They attribute authority and eminent value to the printed word [the media], or, conversely, reject it altogether. As these people do not possess enough knowledge to reflect and discern, they believe—or disbelieve—in toto what they read. And as such people, moreover, will select the easiest, not the hardiest reading matter, they are precisely on the level at which the printed word can seize and convince them without opposition. They are perfectly adapted to propaganda.[13]
As one sees more and more students coming equipped and fully armed with clichés and then commensurately upset when this progressing phenomenon is pointed out to them (in a society of clichés, pointing out clichés is offensive), society also becomes more and more and ever better adjusted to rising Nazism as well. That’s also the point at which what was once liberal thought starts assuming a shape and taste of a corpse and hence also the tastes of fascism and its necrophilia and love of death.
With respect to the phrase “The Medium is the Message,” McLuhan’s son explains the inside joke encoded in it:
“The medium is the message” is pregnant with all kinds of meanings. My father used this phrase as the title of a book that came out in the late sixties. Only he gave it a little twist. He called the book The Medium is the Massage. There are four puns in that little phrase. First, “the medium is the message”—the familiar phrase. Split “message” into two words: mess-age. Every new medium makes a mess of the age. It messes up the current situation. The “message”: every new medium gives the culture a working over and a complete message—both unexpected and unwanted. Then split “massage” into two words: mass-age—The medium is the mass age, meaning our present media and mass audiences. So there are four levels of meaning in that title, and he intended all four.[14]
The media like the message then becomes an extension of the cloning of mass society, a society of robots. Coincidentally, the word robot is a neologism coined by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. The word is not just derived from the Slavic word robota, labor, but more directly from the word rob, which does not mean to rob; in Serbian, it means a slave. McLuhan’s own idea of these new robots via Western culture, media and technology means nothing less than “the suppression of … conscience, so as to remove all fear and circumspection … [so that] such a man becomes as the dead, who have passed beyond the necessity of taking thought about the proper course of action.”[15]
In this way, the robotic man then becomes adjustable to any prompt “instantly and without guilt.” He becomes an instrument, a flute and an ear that cannot help but obey the incoming tune.[16] The robot becomes the functional, efficient it, which is “freed … to respond to virtually any suggestion, especially of a sensuous or symbolic nature, and [is] a fair game for the non-rational self.”[17] The robotic man “easily falls into the dark”—into a “boundless, directionless” chaos in which “individualism is lost.”[18] Or, as McLuhan put it elsewhere, to be “well-adjusted” is to be a “user [who is] sound asleep.”[19]
When and inasmuch as this is achieved, the middle man and mid-level management—and the previous mediation standing in-between—could be then eliminated as well.[20] Thus, under globalization, “whole layers of middle management have been stripped out of both public and private sector organizations …”[21] As this progression is happening, the mediating role and screen of democracy and liberalism is also being withdrawn. Capitalism, originally established as the ascendancy of the middle class and a regime of the peddlers and middle men, is then not only changing as well, but it might also be entering its penultimate phase. In fact, “the reality of modern [late] democracy is that many political decisions are taken by small groups of highly qualified and knowledgeable individuals … in [their essentially] private worlds …”[22] In this way, a new, different landscape and order might also emerge—provided that one could still see it or form a true idea about it.
As McLuhan insists, this robot man is supposed to have his “(left-hemisphere) thinking atrophied.”[23] And we can add that, with the loss of left-hemisphere thinking, genuinely leftist thought and alternative would need to atrophy as well. When and once this happens, the world, as we know it, will pass, and a “second phase of the original creation” or a new world order will come.[24] In this world, new thinking and holism will emerge “controlled by a considerably smaller group of management elite;” and only “a small elite will become the guardian at the temple gate.”[25] The political implications of this transformation will “create a world government.”[26]
The “speed” and technology of the system will “inhibit the humanity ability to decode [it].”[27] “A new robotic corporate entity” will be the true constitution of this new world order—a point otherwise dutifully lost at the end of McLuhan’s chapter, “Global Robotism,” in the heap of other words on page 129. [28] And it is the ego trip and selfies which are taking us there—into that destination—for a ride.[29]
What political regime does best or most closely correspond to a society of such robot-slaves or the dead? Here both political thought and the crisis in Ukraine are presenting us with a potent answer.
Yet the message—”The Medium is the Message,” which has its own solid banalization literally programmed and projected into it—was, according to McLuhan, its author, not simply a comment or utterance, but an all-powerful formula, into which he folded a “new science” or even “the new science” of the media, technology, and “all human artifacts,” and its four categorical “laws” or four-fold negations of negations: 1) extension-amplification; 2) rendering obsolete or numb; 3) retrieval of what was previously lost or made obsolete; and 4) reversal or inversion when reaching the limit.[30] In other words, for McLuhan, “the Medium is the Message” was or is to be the Nomos of all the four Nomoi of everything that man ever did, does or is bound to do and, therefore, in its very essence, is nothing trivial or of little significance at all. The Medium is the Message is thus supposed to be not simply a method, but the universal, all-powerful method to all human wisdom and folly alike as well as the ultimate key to locking or unlocking mankind’s destiny as such.
McLuhan’s groundbreaking reflections on the media were taking place during the parallel and inter-related revolutions, which included: cybernetics, behavioralism in political science, the cultural revolution in the US (as opposed to the dead-end one in China), and, certainly not least, CIA-led MK-ULTRA mind control re-enslavement experiments built off the earlier work of Nazi experts (who were brought to the US after World War II as part of operation Paperclip).
As there is a method to madness as well as power, there is also a method to the Empire and its “managed chaos.” Briefly put, the method is to make us forget what matters most. When one forgets what matters, it costs less or very little (or even nothing at all) to buy a man. One might be bought for as little as a cliché. Furthermore, a man who does not know what truly matters would not be able to fight for what he does not know—for what really matters.
When, after World War II, the US became a global hegemon, the search and demand for the right scientific method (of knowledge, power, and control) produced in (American) political science a whole new discipline and requirement called “Research Methods,” a child of the “behavioralist revolution” and, in turn, the faux-revolution’s disciplinary enforcer. If one chooses to follow what one might call a British opinion on the subject –a comparatively more traditional or liberally oriented opinion (“political science in Europe used to defend its own comparative style and methods against US Hegemony”)—then reading in-between the lines, one could piece together from an otherwise mundane and typical textbook few considerably less trivial things than what is commonly taught about politics and its present-day mediations.[31]
From the get-go, the method fostered by American political science was putting a premium on universal uniformities, which required, as if in turn, that political thinking be focused on “immediate social problems” and “abandon great issues” for being too “unscientific.”[32] This meant again, as if in turn, to let “the method” displace or devalue substance. Method was to rule over content “even if [this] distorted reality.” Methods were supposedly “more robust than the alternatives.”[33] The new methodology or American political science (for most part), being thus oriented pragmatically, functionally, positively and optimistically, could not “entertain a commitment to ontological depth (hidden generative mechanisms in nature and society)”—not least because that’s where, in those darker, subversive waters, began Marxism and similar monstrosities.[34]
Rather than going dangerously too deep, the way has been open toward ever greater banalities and “an exercise that is ultimately meaningless.”[35] In this way, what is reproduced and recycled are “everyday assumptions of society, and these common perceptions and understandings are encouraged and reinforced by those with access to the media while [the rest is] discouraged as stupid, immoral and illegitimate.”[36] Chomsky quote
Clichés and slogans figuring as thoughts are thus presented as knowledge and common sense, and genuine thinking is greeted as irrational and impolite—it does not meet the method. A concentrated amount of such media, method, and political science, which place a main emphasis on presentation and spin, then produces “a mass,” a great gap between rhetoric and reality or a measured and shared stupidity.[37]
So while “the Medium is the Message,” whereby one may also say and mean nothing at all, the key to this expansive ambiguity conducive to trivia, clichés, and flat-footed stereotypes is, as just indicated, that great, serious issues and questions are lost and forgotten. The media and politics is then not unlike a man-constructed river of Lethe, which, when taken in, forces all to leak and waste the treasures of their minds and souls.[38] So what are these big, yet discarded and neglected questions, which we have forgotten to ask? And how is this forgetting through the insect-like buzz of the media and politicians relevant to or illuminative of what is happening in Ukraine?
Return of the Stranger and the Missing Meaning
One of the books, which I received as a little boy was Ernest Thompson Seton’s novel Two Little Savages Being Adventures of Two Boys Who Lived as Indians and What They Learned (1917). For some strange reason, one passage from the whole book made a lasting and unforgettable impression on me. It is an encounter between a boy and a stranger described in Chapter V, “The Colorless Stranger.” This is how it is introduced and how it unfolds:
Oh, sympathy! The noblest gift of God to man.
The greatest bond there is twixt man and man.
…
The ten times noble base of noblest love.
More deep than love—more strong than hate—the biggest thing
in all the universe—the law of laws.
…
Each year the ancient springtime madness came more strongly on Yan. Each year he was less inclined to resist it … How was it that the ponds all around should be full of them calling to him and playing hide and seek and yet defying his most careful search? The voices ceased as soon as he came near, to be gradually renewed in the pools he had left. His presence was a husher. He lay for a long time watching a pool, but none of the voices began again in range of his eye. … He located the spot within a few inches and yet could see nothing. He was utterly baffled, and lay there puzzling over it, when suddenly all the near Peepers stopped, and Yan was startled by a footfall; and looking around, he saw a man within a few feet, watching him. Yan reddened—a stranger was always an enemy; he had a natural aversion to all such, and stared awkwardly as though caught in crime. The man, a curious looking middle-aged person, was in shabby clothes and wore no collar. …
“F’what are ye fynding, my lad?” said he in tones whose gentleness was in no way obscured by a strong Scottish tang. …Yan said: “I’’m not finding anything; I am only trying to see what that Whistling Lizard is like.”
The stranger’s eyes twinkled. “Forty years ago Ah was laying by a pool just as Ah seen ye this morning, looking and trying hard to read the riddle of the spring Peeper. Ah lay there all day, aye, and mony anither day, yes, it was nigh onto three years before Ah found it oot. Ah’ll be glad to save ye seeking as long as Ah did, if that’s yer mind. Ah’ll show ye the Peeper.”
Then he raked carefully among the leaves near the ditch, and soon captured a tiny Frog, less than an inch long. “Ther’s your Whistling Lizard: he no a Lizard at all, but a Froggie. Book men call him Hyla pickeringii, an’ a gude Scotchman he’d make, for ye see the St. Andrew’s cross on his wee back. Ye see the whistling ones in the water put on’y their beaks oot an’ is hard to see. Then they sinks to the bottom when ye come near. But you tak this’n home and treat him well and ye’ll see him blow out his throat as big as himsel’ an’ whistle like a steam engine.”… The Pewee of his early memories became the Phoebe of books. … The stranger warmed, too, and his rugged features glowed; he saw in Yan one minded like himself, tormented with the knowledge-hunger, as in youth he himself had been; and now it was a priceless privilege to save the boy some of what he had suffered. His gratitude to Yan grew fervid, and Yan—he took in every word; nothing that he heard was forgotten. He was in a dream, for he had found at last the greatest thing on earth—sympathy—broad, intelligent, comprehensive sympathy. That spring morning was ever after like a new epoch in Yan’s mind—not his memory, that was a thing of the past—but in his mind, his living present.[39]
Like Seton’s or Yan’s colorless stranger, I think that I too can offer, after some years of reading and thinking, to share a shortcut of sorts and unveil the present, yet for most part disappeared “frogs” or great questions, which also happen to have a direct bearing to Ukraine. Two comparatively lost, neglected and otherwise forgotten big questions are enslavement and tyranny—however archaic or obtuse these questions might appear in the light of our today’s received clichés. These two are related, and I would argue that, without understanding these two, we can neither properly understand Nazism nor the deeper and darker forces at work in today’s Ukrainian crisis.
Thus, in his private letter to Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, the great late renovator of American political thought affirmed:
A science that cannot speak of tyranny with the same confidence with which medicine speaks, for example, of cancer, cannot understand social phenomena as what they are. It is therefore not scientific. Present-day social science is the inevitable result of modern social science and of modern philosophy … Once we have learned again from the classics what tyranny is, we shall be enabled and compelled to diagnose as tyrannies a number of contemporary regimes which appear in the guise of dictatorships. This diagnosis can only be the first step toward an exact analysis of present-day tyranny, for [resent-day tyranny is fundamentally different from the tyranny analyzed by the classics.[40]
So tyranny is one of the great and seemingly abandoned questions. Slavery is another. But slavery not as an area of historical antiquarianism or passing cultural anomaly, but as a systemic question linked to capitalism and, in fact, as Emmanuel Wallerstein noted, to “the central political tension” in the heart of the US itself:
We are facing the need to rethink and restate the conceptual frameworks we have inherited from the 19th century in order to under- stand and contribute meaningfully to the long world-systemic transition to socialism which has begun and in which we are living. The publication in 1974 of two major works on slavery in the United States has been an academic event. … The two books speak to, and are designed to speak to, the central sociopolitical tension of American national life: the systematic oppression of Blacks, its causes and consequences, economic, political, and social.[41]
From there, Wallerstein then goes to argue—against the established stereotypes and clichés—that enslavement did not or might not have been merely “transitional … but the heart and essence of capitalism [which] as a mode of production … [does also demand] coerced or semicoerced semiwage labor.”[42] The fact is that “the slave owners were indeed capitalists … they were operating in a capitalist world-economy.”[43] The difference between outright slave labor and wage labor was as much a matter of the force of resistance as a question of cost efficiency and the use of the state, i.e., its means of violence and control, to extract the largest share of the surplus value.[44]
The other singular, yet stereotypically downplayed fact is that capitalism took off with oversea colonization and the discovery of America, which became not only a place where Europe’s indentured and penal labor was shipped, but which also rediscovered and resumed slavery for the West as its key profitable business and political venture.
The fact (albeit now almost taboo) is that the much celebrated Constitution of the United States was a constitution of a slave state. By 1750, slavery was a legal institution in all of the thirteen American colonies.[45] From the 1630s till the American Revolution at the end of 18th century, between one half and two thirds of all European immigrants to America were indentured servants.[46] Besides counting slaves as two-thirds of a free person, the US Constitution had slavery as an institution inscribed in the Fifth Amendment of its Bill of Rights, which states that, “No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”—slaves were understood as property. This constitutional “right” was part of the legal basis for treating slaves as property with Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). President Lincoln confessed:
American slavery is no small affair, and it cannot be done away with at once. It is part of
our national life. It is not of yesterday. It began in colonial times. In one way or another it has shaped nearly everything that enters into what we call government. It is as much northern as it is southern. It is not merely a local or geographical institution. It belongs to our politics, to our industries, to our commerce, and to our religion. Every portion of our territory in some form or another has contributed to the growth and the increase of slavery. It has been nearly two hundred years coming up to its present proportions. It is wrong, a great evil indeed, but the South is not more responsible for the wrong done to the African race than is the North.”[47]
Slaves were a commodity that was sold, bought, or even rented. Furthermore, as McLuhan also pointed out, “the slave plantation was the original factory”—the original paradigm of capitalist efficiency.[48] For a while, the word capital competed for giving the name to the whole system against its kin chattel, which is, however, etymologically related to capital itself via Latin capital property.[49] As a term, chattel also applied to slaves. And it also so happened—and clearly for some grave reasons—that the most progressive capitalist leader, the US, was also the very last among Western powers to abolish slavery (by changing it into effectively indentured labor and apartheid serfdom), but only at the cost of a large civil war. If slavery receded, Wallerstein argues, it was then mainly because of the constraints of the geopolitical standoff between the US and the British imperial hegemony, which did not allow the US to externalize the “bulk of the cost of slave breeding” (i.e., by capturing adult slaves abroad, thus without having to pay the cost for the years of their upbringing).[50]
Exploring the ossified clichés of the system, Wallerstein also uncovered the strangeness of the very terms “bourgeois” and “middle class”: where there is a lie, there has to be a medium, which places us into the unreal—into a gap in front of reality. Speaking of the bourgeois, Wallerstein marvels:
In the mythology of the modern world, the quintessential protagonist is the bourgeois. Hero for some, villain for others, the inspiration or lure for most, he has been the shaper of the present and the destroyer of the past. In English, we tend to avoid the term ‘bourgeois’, preferring in general the locution ‘middle class’ (or classes). It is a small irony that despite the vaunted individualism of Anglo-Saxon thought, there is no convenient singular form for ‘middle class(es)’. We are told by the linguists that the term appeared for the first time in Latin form, burgensis, in 1007 and is recorded in French as
burgeis as of 1100. It originally designated the inhabitant of a bourg, an urban
area, but an inhabitant who was ‘free.’ Free, however, from what? Free
from the obligations that were the social cement and the economic nexus of
a feudal system. The bourgeois was not a peasant or serf, but he was also not a noble.[51]
As Wallerstein indicates, the bourgeois is assumed to be someone who is not a serf (the medieval analogue to the slave) and also someone who is supposed to be free from the nexus of the feudal system, into which he was born. The agent of the capitalist system is thus middling, mediated ambiguity.[52] The bourgeois is then like an Ariadne’s thread, but one that rather leads into a labyrinth of confusion than out of it.[53]
Confusion became mystification, which turned the bourgeois very much upside down or reversed as the sides facing us are reversed in the mirror. Both liberal and Marxist economics taught us to believe that capitalists are after profits as opposed to rents. The trivial, but denied fact is that rent is not an antithesis of profit; rent is the profit’s avatar, and “every capitalist seeks to transform [precarious] profit into rent,”[54] which would be as universal and as eternal as possible. Thus, instead of being the antithesis of feudalism, serfdom and slavery in general, the bourgeois is a master in the making: “the primary objective of every ‘bourgeois’ is to become an ‘aristocrat’”—who would own people as a source of his fixed rent.[55] And such rent is first and foremost political power. Its condition is a monopoly, i.e., a monopoly on violence. And it is this monopoly for which capitalists are striving.[56]
As rent-seekers, the capitalists’ goal is not freedom of mankind, it is mankind’s re-enslavement. To love money-making is to love people as tools, as commodities, as money, which is no love at all—it means to love people as extensions of one’s body, which can’t resist or oppose it.
Under the capitalist mediation, the tyranny of the means displaces the meaning. In a similar way, the media, means and “methods” replace and displace the heart of the matter—the art of thinking. Media are tied to the “middle,” but, originally, rather than being the middle or the heart of the matter, the word denoted not only what was in-between, but also the edge and the boundary. But the limit became soon a medium and then also the center of things, which it displaced.[57] Without right care and thinking, the media, the means, are set to decenter us from reality.
What would then be the most radical decentering of man and society? Man’s new re-enslavement, the loss of his thought that would allow him to oppose and resist this extreme threat.
But what was the original center, the center that held the whole together—if there was any? The measure of things used to be the thinking mind; the measure or modus is cognate with Greek médesthai be mindful, mémos spirit, purpose, intent, Latin mens mind, meditari to meditate, Old Slavic miněti to think, Sanskrit mánas mind. Moreover, the underlying essence of the mind was the idea of paying attention to (to “truly mean it,” we would say it in English today), caring and loving.[58] From thinking as caring or careful, loving thinking, we have also received our words for healing through medicine. In other words, not only is thinking a way of healing and loving, it originally also denoted “the knowledge of the best (true) course.”[59] Means and media are in this regard mediating, mediated thought by dis- and replacing it.
Media and mediocre share the same root, except that medium has also a sense of spirit and “enveloping substance or environment” or persons who “convey messages from and to dead people.”[60] In this regard, the media, modes, methods and means are also a figure not only of exchange, but of change, transformation or metamorphosis, which stand in a radical opposition to the immediacy of living thought and realization and through which we “advance” and are transposed and changed out of our own selves.[61]
While it is true that capitalism derives its name from a notion of head and principal, hence from something that is prime, principal, fundamental, and most important, one also needs to add that capitalism works by continuously destroying and displacing the “head,” principles and what matters or ought to matter by the dictatorship of the means, media, and money. In other words, capitalism is putting the means and the media in the place of the “head” (and ends) whereby the means and the media are not merely intervening in between or mediating, but they are also cutting off the audience from what is and from their own thought.
Under capitalism, man’s head, so to speak, and principles are exchanged (or shortchanged) for other things. More specifically, thought is replaced with cliché, idea with opinion, love with lust, and justice with apathy and a suspension of judgment and thought.
This process characterizes the very genesis of modern capitalism. While it is true that modern capitalism emerged together with new channels of communications, the making of the new system was more specifically tied to the displacement of the institution, the name of which capitalism expropriated and behind the name of which capitalism is hiding its truth—the market, which used to be a circumscribed, open, public, and regulated place of the community.
As Fernand Braudel abundantly shows, modern capitalism actually displaced the traditional markets and asserted itself once the old markets were vanquished by means of private (and intermediary) trading:
[Capitalism introduced itself] as a way of getting around the open or public market, which was closely supervised. The initiators of such private trading were substantial travelling merchants, peddlers and salesmen … That the newcomer with the many faces was detested, hated for his cunning, intransigence, and hart-heartedness is abundantly clear … This new kind of trade … was a revolution which went beyond the economy, into social behavior. … [The new traders were making business] “by whispering in each other’s ear, by speaking low or by signs, and in strange or hidden words.” … [They] contrived to anticipate [and thus pre-empt] the market, by going down the highways in search of the countrymen and relieving him of the goods he was bringing, to sell them at any price they please. … It is also perfectly clear that the labor market—as a reality if not as a concept—was not a creation of the industrial era. The labor market was the market upon which a man offered himself [or was offered by those who owned him] …[62]
Genealogically and politically, the bourgeois is also analogous to Aristotle’s nameless, cipher-like regime, “which is rarely found in practice [and is thus] overlooked” (Politics 1293a35). It is a mixture of oligarchy and democracy and, as such, is a product of “the method of mixing” or mediation (1294a30). The nature of this ambiguous “mixture” is dual; it is a mixture of freedom and wealth, which omits virtue (1294a9). Aristotle thus also calls it “the middle constitution” where a “mean conduct” by “a middle class” (hoi meson), could serve as “the best constitution for the majority of states and the majority of men whose virtue does not rise above that of ordinary people …” (1295a25).
While rare or unnoticed back then, this regime of the mediocrity was for Aristotle bound to serve eventually the majority of people in the majority of states as a form of middle political limbo, which would be “a mean open to men of every kind to attain” (1295a34). Mediocrity without virtue and the ability to tell things apart is then called “moderation,” thus implying that to have a virtue would be immoderate and, therefore, an act of wrongdoing. Moderation—in effect, the lack of virtue and understanding—is then also presented as what is best (1295b1, 1295b34). Such a middle regime encourages all to be “alike” (1295b13).
The desire or need for such an “intermediate constitution” stems from the prudently recognized need to accept this middle ground in the place of defeat, when the aim to rule over others is not realistically achievable under given circumstances (1296a22). In other words, this middle is possible and can be even relatively stable if the intermediate (we can say bourgeois) mediocrity (meritocracy of the mediocre) prevails both over those who “have a superabundance of good fortune, riches, friends … [and] la dolce vita” and those who, in contrast, “are greatly deficient in these qualities” (1296b34, 1295b13). The former “do not know how to be ruled in any way at all, and can command only like a master over slaves.” The latter are “too subservient; they do not know to rule, but only how to be ruled as a slave is” (1295b13). It would be thus also possible to see this political intermediacy not only as a happy mean or moderation, but also as a political stalemate, the continuity of which depends on the inability of the oligarchy to have all its wishes, its desire for slaves, come true. At the same time, the other key premise of the stability of this system is the political ignorance and acquiescence of the majority of the people. And such political ignorance is best made of false and hollow, thoughtless stereotypes and clichés that disable the spirit and the mind.
This middle ambiguity allows for protracted political and ideological confusion and ignorance where most people are deprived of the ability to know and tell which is which, confusing democracies for oligarchies:
When states became larger … the number of sharers in the constitution became larger. For this reason what we nowadays call ‘polities’ [the middle constitutions] were formerly called democracies. But the constitutions of those early times were, understandably enough, oligarchical or royal; owing to the smallness of the population their middle element was not large, and so, being neither numerous nor well organized, they were content to allow others to rule. (Politics 1297b12)
As Aristotle carefully indicates, a system where people are misled and deceived to mistake oligarchy for democracy meets his definition of the middle regime. It is a system where people of average understanding and little virtue are grown to be content to let others to rule since they assume that they live in a different regime than what is actually the case. They have been effectively and successfully demeaned by being sold a fiction of a better regime.
The sense of the underlying question of slavery and its mediation-cum-modification by money, modern culture, and technology is already sounded off in Marx’s and Engel’s Communist Manifesto. While Marx and Engels define “proletariat” as “the class of modern wage laborers … [who] are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live,”[63] the importance of wage quickly for them disappears and proletarians are quickly, repeatedly, and openly called “slaves”:
· Proletarians are nothing but a commodity.
· “Not only they are slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine …”
· Proletarians have “lost all individual character.”
· Such enslavement “obliterates all [their human] distinctions …”
· “They have nothing of their own …”
· The bourgeoisie rules by “assuring an existence to its slave within his slavery …”
· The proletarian is “a mere instrument of production.”
· Prostitution and proletarian labor belong to the same mode of subjugation and appropriation.[64]
As we can see, for Marx and Engels, difference between wage earners and slaves, i.e., the presence of a wage, quickly or rather immediately dissolves together with all the other human distinctions and qualities, which are denied to the “proletarians.” They are seen merely as tools, instruments, a commodity, and property. This is, indeed, a very radical reductionism and simplification, but this is also precisely what Marx and Engels claim for capitalism as a system in contrast to the liberals, as well as Hegel.
Marx and Engels argue that mediations have come to an end and with them also all moderations, intermediary gradations, veils, and illusions:
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie,” they argue, “possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonism. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, two great classes directly facing each other: bourgeoisie and proletariat. … In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, [capitalism] has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”[65]
While Marx and Engels do here injustice to the crucial importance and pervasiveness of mediation, and the modern media, in particular, their point indicates that slavery, and slavery spread and intensified in some new radical way, is the essence of the apocalyptic system. As a result, what has been hitherto “a more or less veiled civil war” is turning into an open and universal civil war, which is transforming a hitherto invisible or unseen ghost, a specter, into a real, open, and manifested power of the new “nether world.”[66]
In his writings on slavery and the Civil War in the United States, Marx did, moreover, foresee a possibility of slavery’s expansion under capitalism:
[Had there been] a peaceful surrender of the contested area to the Southern Confederacy … [the Union would be] reorganized, a reorganization on the basis of slavery, under the acknowledged control of the slave-holding oligarchy [Marx’s own emphases]. The plan for such a reorganization was openly proclaimed … The slave system would thus infect the whole Union. In the Northern states, where Negro slavery is, in practice, inoperable, the whole working class would be gradually reduced to the level of helotry. This would be in full accord with the loudly proclaimed principle that only certain races are capable of freedom, and as in the South actual labor is the lot of the Negroes, so in the North it is the lot of the Germans and Irish or their direct descendents. The present struggle between South and North is thus nothing less than a struggle between two social systems: the system of slavery and the system of free labor. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer peacefully coexist … It can only end by the victory of one system or the other.[67]
Under a closer scrutiny, we see that, as if out of the blue, Marx here sees two systems existing both side by side and against each other in the outward, apparent unity and homogeneity of the capitalist system. If, in The Communist Manifesto, the essential difference between these two systems and even the existence of this double was denied, here it is not only acknowledged, but an argument is made that, at a certain point, the otherwise denied, concealed, or trivialized existence of this double is bound to come to surface, the assumed unity of the system is to be ruptured, and the two systems—and not just modes or regimes—will fight each other to death.
Furthermore, in order to describe and understand this other system—the system of new universal slavery—Marx resorts to a term from ancient political thought (from where also comes the term “proletariat” by the way). Besides the concept of helotry borrowed from ancient Sparta, he also uses the term oligarchy. In this regard, it is noteworthy that this old political term of oligarchy and oligarchs was reintroduced into our political language mainly by the Russian people who spontaneously recovered this term for describing their new system and post-Soviet experience. People’s sense of reality and the need to call it with its proper name has thus bested the sterile political correctness and prevalent adopted clichés in contemporary political science and the learned circles of those who are paid to think and know. In fact, I myself was involved in a debate over the term “oligarchy” with some of these elite gatekeepers who are still convinced that the term should not be used because it is “not neutral,” because it is “biased” and thus inappropriate. As we will shortly see, for the people who rose against the Kiev regime, the principal issue is understood first as a struggle against Nazism and fascism and second as a struggle against oligarchy, which they see not only as a Ukrainian problem, but also as the problem of the whole world system. Their revolt against both Nazism and oligarchy is then commonly and spontaneously understood—despite and against the prevalent clichés and claims of present-day (American) political science—as the revolt against their enslavement by the self-same oligarchs and new Nazis.
In commenting on this great (and more or less suppressed) big question of the capitalist system (which, as we can see, actually contains and often conceals two systems), Marx further noted:
Anxiety to keep the ‘loyal’ slave/holders … in good humor and fear of driving them [away] … in a word, a tender regard for [their] interests, prejudices and sensibilities … have affected the Union with incurable paralysis since the beginning of war, driven it to take half-measures, forced it to hypocritically disavow the principle at issue in the war and to spare the enemy’s most vulnerable spot—the root of the evil—slavery itself.[68]
In addition, Marx also emphasized yet another essential tendency on the part of this capitalist oligarchy: “[T]he political spokesmen, lawyers, moralists and theologians of the slave-holders’ party had tried to prove not so much that Negro slavery is justified but rather that color is immaterial and that slavery is the lot of the working class everywhere”… incidentally, just as Marx and Engels were themselves arguing in their Communist Manifesto.[69] Under either favorable conditions or out of necessity, oligarchy grows powerful and/or radical enough not only to desire slavery, but slavery as expansive as possible.
Once oligarchy evolves or degenerates far enough to embrace slavery as its political, economic, and culture program, conquest and war to generate slaves as spoils of mankind becomes oligarchy’s business.[70] Oligarchy becomes an enslaving oligarchy when it becomes “unrestricted oligarchy.”[71] When that happens and in order to plan and carry out its hunting conquests, oligarchy turns toward tyranny and military dictatorship.[72] In the language of the 20th and 21st centuries, such oligarchy turns toward Nazism. To this effect, oligarchy abandons progressive republicanism and revolutionizes itself as an extreme reaction.
But, as long as oligarchy remains restrained and restricted or, to put it differently, moderated and mediated under the reign of liberal stereotypes and clichés about capitalism, “bourgeois society [is not yet] aware that the ghosts of Rome had watched over its cradle, since it [remains] wholly absorbed in the production of wealth and the peaceful struggle of economic competition.”[73]
As long as oligarchy needs society to stay safely “unheroic,” as long as it does not deserve its Nietzschean self-awakening toward a new beast-superman, oligarchy tries to present itself merely as house-management and emphasizes economics, depoliticizations, separation of politics and economics and its own civility and manners, which it requires from everyone else. Slavery requires enthusiasm and terror.
Before that moment of truth is reached, oligarchy remains limited and so does its “bourgeois content of [its] struggles.” But this also means that, as long as the link between oligarchy and enslavement stays in the dark, capitalist society uses self-deceptions needed to hide its deepest desires and nature. Until then, oligarchy repeats its former crimes and past mainly as a parody and farce, and the role of the media is supreme. When, however, oligarchy reaches the fullness of its time, so to speak, when it recovers its nether spirit again, then “the great historical tragedy” is born again, and reaction completes its full revolution.[74]
Elsewhere Marx describes such consummate, final oligarchy as the rule of financial capital which
makes its own laws, controls the state administration, exercises authority in all public institutions, controls public opinion … [in an] unbridled assertion of unhealthy and vicious appetites in permanent conflict with the bourgeois law itself … [in appetites] in which pleasure becomes debauched [crapuleux], in which money, filth and blood commingle.” Oligarchy in this terminal stage is “nothing but the lumperproletariat reborn at the pinnacle of bourgeois society [Marx’s emphases].[75]
Oligarchy gravitates toward slave-holding with money, filth and blood commingled by its own inner character—by its own class interest and spirit. Here it also needs to be pointed out that Ukrainian oligarchs under a special indulgence of Western oligarchy have reached through Maidan the very point at which money, filth and blood commingle.
Short of its ultimate self-realization, oligarchy needs in the interest of its self-preservation coverings and veils and, for each of its progressive “revolutions” (back to the past), a pretext as general and universal as possible: “The general pretext dulls the perceptions of [the other] classes; it enables [these other classes] to deceive themselves as to the [actual] character of the coming revolution, as to the consequences of [their] own deeds. Every revolution needs a banquet question.”[76] Liberal and democratic slogans usually serve as such pretexts.
The transformation of oligarchy into tyrannical, enslaving oligarchy and a new round of enslavement is also the meaning of Marx’s old enigma and apparent misquotation of Hegel about the doubling of history and the repetition of events as tragedies and farces, together with all the figures of the ghosts, spirits, nightmares, the dead, death-masks, disguises, and old imperial costumes. It was, indeed, a riddle worthy of either a Sphinx or an Oedipus.
http://vladimirsuchan.blogspot.com/2015/10/in-search-of-idea-ideology-of.html
This is a considerable work and I have broken it up bit for ease of handling. Have not read yet, I suspect it will be good fodder for analysis.
On October 28, in Moscow, a conference was held in the "search of a party of a new type," organized by the Center for Political Thought and Ideology ("Sulakshin's Center") with the participation of Igor Strelkov.
Besides political, organizational, strategic and tactical questions and others, the key question raised was that of the Idea which can become life and real political power.
This what was said in particular (I am leaving it in the Russian original):
http://rusrand.ru/files/15/10/29/151029090410_IMG_8939.gif
СМИ:
«А по поводу идеологии? Вы же сказали, что такие планы есть?»
Подводя итоги научно-экспертной сессии, генеральный директор Центра Степан Сулакшин заявил, что Центр научной политической мысли и идеологии в научно-экспертном плане исследует проблему грядущей политической трансформации в стране. В частности, сказал:
«Она неизбежна. И отведет страну от пагубного и критически губительного либерального курса, который превратился в официальную программу и политическую линию правящего режима в стране, ее руководства и ее президента Владимира Путина. Эта линия для страны губительна. Поэтому прогноз говорит о том, что в стране обязательно зародятся и сформируются и в какой-то перспективе получат ответственность за ее развитие силы, стоящие на иной ценностной платформе. На платформе, отрицающей расслоение, социальный паразитизм, ослабление государственности, игнорирование цивилизационной идентичности, ценностной основы в государственном управлении.
Это уже фактически формирующаяся новая идеология и новая политическая платформа, которая может в недалекой перспективе лечь в основу формирования новой политической партии в стране. Но не надо понимать ее как еще одну в ряду многих десятков партий, которые зарегистрированы в Министерстве юстиции РФ и играются в игрушки по недобросовестным правилам игры. Надо понимать так, что «партия нового типа» имеет цель преобразования облика страны, а не занятия одного-двух кресел с хорошей стипендией в каком-нибудь Парламенте, и что это сила поставит целью изменение самих правил игры. Важно, что речь идет о законных, мирных и ненасильственных путях трансформации. Поэтому войдут в эту партию люди здоровые, патриотичные, сыны своего Отечества, люди с представлением о праведном, о правильном, и такие в стране есть. Сейчас они поднимают голос, начинают находить друг друга, эта сеть в ближайшие годы вырастет в общественно-политическую силу, и может быть она будет называться и не партией. Главное, что страна должна возродиться, так называемая социальная иммунная система, которая больной организм спасает от чужеродных ему вирусов и бацилл».
So perhaps time has come for me to post here a paper I presented last year in Sweden and which the organizers of the conference, led by Russian ex-pats, then refused to publish because they dismissed it as "propaganda," while they also dubbed Novorossiya and the Russian Mir "imaginary." I have been sitting on the paper then for almost a year. But at last here it is the way it was submitted. Perhaps there is something in it which can strike some cord with those who want and need to formulate the meaning of Russian revival. If this paper ran into undisguised hostility of the (Russian) opponents of Russian Mir, then perhaps the defenders of Russian Mir might find here something of value or interest.
Lessons of a Virtual Activist from the Ukrainian Battles for Eurasia
(The Message Is the Medium, and the Message Is Great Power)
Vladimir Suchan
Paper prepared for
Eurasia 2.0 Conference 2014,
“Post-Soviet Geopolitics in the Age of the New Media”
UCRS Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies
Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden,
3-4 November 2014
“When you say the medium is the message, you’re uttering an obvious contradiction, because normally you reserve the word ‘message’ for the content and ‘medium’ for the container, as it were. … In fact, it doesn’t mean what it appears on the surface, and the trouble with it comes from most people not delving below the surface. … [My father] may have had tongue in cheek … but he was quite precise.”[1]
Eric McLuhan
“The people running the world right now are insane, and the public is sleep walking into a tragedy. If you want to alter the course that we are on, there’s only one way to do it. We have to wake up that public. Even the most powerful weapons of war are neutralized if you reach the mind of the man behind the trigger.”[2]
“Geopolitics of World War III,” SCG News
“In essence, the principal fight for Novorossiya is the battle for hearts, minds, and souls of people. Who wins this principal battle will win the war. In this battle politicians are not playing the main role at all. The main fighters are journalists, artists, and, especially, poets.”[3]
“На самом деле главный бой за Новороссию - это бой за сердца, умы и души людей. Тот, кто выиграет этот главный бой, - выиграет сражение. В этом бою политики играют далеко не главную роль. Главные бойцы - это журналисты, писатели, художники и, безусловно, певцы. И среди многих, Вика Цыганова на передовой.”
Oleg Tzarev, a Novorossiya leader
“Now people understand that it is not necessary to believe in leaders. We don’t need to believe in any Yanukovich, we don’t need to believe in a Party of Regions. We need to organize ourselves by ourselves--and to remember our own history, remember our own culture. That is our foundation. So thank you to all the Banderites who have come into Kiev, and who have made people remember who they are, who they are in the world, and above all why they are here on this earth.”[4]
A man from Kramatorsk
“Something woke up in my soul, and I realized that my place is here, that Russians are my brothers and that their pain is also my pain. I am happy now for my life is becoming meaningful; I am Russian in the spirit now.”[5]
Christien Gillion, a French volunteer with the Army of Novorossiya
“The struggle for Novorossiya is a struggle for hearts, minds, and souls of people. Who wins this principal struggle will win it all.”
“Бой за Новороссию - это бой за сердца, умы и души людей. Тот, кто выиграет этот главный бой, - выиграет сражение.” [6]
Reports from the Militia of Novorossiya
The Medium is the Message
Let’s begin with Marshall McLuhan’s foundational dictum: “The medium is the message.” Great familiarity with this axiom of the media and modern political techniques and its corresponding facile overuse has become a password allowing us to repeat things which we don’t understand or no longer bother to think too much about. But others have already heard it and are familiar with it and, thus, when we say it too, we obtain a nod and are let into the ranks of the familiar spirits and of those who approve of the like as we do.
The statement worthy of a real marshal thus becomes like many other things part of the buzzing noise on our anthill or beehive. The more we clothe ourselves and others in its sound, which is required to produce McLuhan’s sentence, the more its meaning or depth is being worn off together with our own distinctive thinking or consciousness.
McLuhan’s Delphic oracle then becomes a cliché, a notion inversely related to having a clue. Unbeknownst to us, we are thus robbing ourselves of thought, depth, and the key to our own mind. Cliché is from clicher, which is expressive of the action when one is struck—struck by a solid, “stereotype block” or mold—and when, as a result, one becomes a common print, a “trite phrase, worn-out expression.”
Cliché, stereotype, and triviality then belong together and are symptomatic of a common état, condition, or disease. Stereotype is from a French word for a “solid plate of type,” further from Greek stereos that means solid and which sounds perilously close to sterile. The sense of “perpetuated without change [or life]” was followed in 1920 by a notion of something “preconceived and oversimplified.”
Stereotypes and clichés are then figures of mental ossification—of thoughts lacking spark, penetration, originality, insight and truth. If Medusa’s early victims were turned into stone under her terrible gaze, modern man and his mind get comfortably numbed and killed by steady and repetitive doses of trite “truths,” echoed stereotypes, and automatic clichés. When improperly or all too commonly handled, McLuhan’s “Medium is the message” becomes one such petrifaction or a sign of petrifaction, which makes its carrier flat, lifeless and dumb in the face of the terrible and evils.
According to McLuhan himself, the medium and its message is supposed to work as a cliché in order to do its work efficiently: “[As] the new artifact or technology pervades the host culture as a new cliché, it displaces, in the process, the old cliché or homeostasis …”[7] Thus, the media and their messages, whatever they are, including the cliché “The Medium is the Message,” are supposed to “pervade the host” and displace its content, its originality. In other words, we have here a formula for perfect parasitic colonization, that is to say, a figure of Western imperialism and its ideal. The least reflected and understood it is, the more unconscious to the host it is, the more perfectly and efficiently it is supposed to work: “We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies.”[8] That’s also McLuhan.
Interestingly though, the cliché, the superficial and the thoughtless, apparently unleashing its power and flood on the world, also match the otherwise seemingly untranslatable Russian idea of a great sin known as poshlost. As Nakobov explains, it is a systemic normalization and ritualization of dishonesty and a vulgar, promiscuously indiscriminate spirit (an anti-thesis of the spirit, that is):
“Poshlust,” or in a better transliteration poshlost, has many nuances, ... corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudo-literature—these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know. ... The flowers of poshlost bloom in such phrases and terms as “the moment of truth,” “charisma,” “existential” (used seriously), “dialogue” (as applied to political talks between nations), and “vocabulary” (as applied to a dauber). ... One of poshlost’s favorite breeding places has always been the Art Exhibition; there it is produced by so-called sculptors working with the tools of wreckers, building crankshaft cretins of stainless steel, Zen stereos, polystyrene stinkbirds, objects trouvés in latrines, cannonballs, canned balls. There we admire the gabinetti wall patterns of so-called abstract artists, Freudian surrealism, roric smudges, and Rorschach blots—all of it as corny in its own right as the academic “September Morns” and “Florentine Flowergirls” of half a century ago.[9]
Poshlost is the “essence” of dead souls, the new form of spiritual, political, moral, and cultural enslavement in the hands and in the minds of new bourgeois masters, who are themselves the concentration of that anti-quality, which may also be defined as the fake, the false and lacking spirituality (dukhovnost). As Gogol explains: ”[Pushkin] used to say of me that no other writer before me possessed the gift to expose so brightly life’s poshlust, to depict so powerfully the poshlust of a poshlusty man [poshlost’ poshlogo cheloveka] in such a way that everybody’s eyes would be opened wide to all the petty trivia that often escape our attention.”[10]
If poshlost was in Russia identified soon enough as man’s and society’s great disease which needs to be exposed and fought against, in the West, poshlost has become an aggressively demanded and promoted form of bourgeois proper conduct. Though in Russia, the battle against poshlost is said to have ended by the 1960s[11]—that’s when Russia (or the Soviet Union then) became more and more ready for its sell-out by the communists themselves and the return back into the bourgeois and oligarchic fold.
Poshlost, or the ability to think only in phrases and clichés (and, if not, to draw a dead blank), can be seen at work in an interview with a Ukrainian special forces captain from Western Ukraine, which was published by Anna News. “As one listens to the captain, it becomes quickly obvious that he draws upon a store of clichés for all of his thoughts and responses.” When he is put in a spot where no cliché comes to his rescue, he immediately becomes lost for thoughts and words and does not know what to think or what to say. He did acknowledge that Aidar battalion is firmly and openly Nazi, but this gave him no further thought or idea about the fact that he was fighting and killing on the same side with them and under the same high command and leadership. He also understands that his grandfathers were fighting against Nazism, Hitler, and Bandera, but again he cannot formulate or conceive a thought, idea, or opinion about his own fighting and killing for what his grandfathers were fighting against. He went to make war in Donbass because it was an order and because the certainty of prison, if he refused, would be a much greater risk for him than the possibility of dying in Donbass or the certain necessity of killing as ordered. When he is asked about the Odessa massacre, he has no thought or opinion either. He is not from Odessa, he was not there when the massacre or “it” happened, and to form any thought or opinion, he would need to see again pictures. Otherwise, he considers himself a well-educated, thoughtful and thinking man and he is sure that his officer’s honor has not been anyhow impaired. At first, he did now know about the Volyn massacres of the 100,000 Poles by Bandera’s soldiers; then he corrects himself and says that he read a little about it in journals such as “men’s magazine” Maxim so that “he cannot tell anything useful about this information”:
Pictures on TV are true, but the sound [interpretation] is not. … When they show pictures on Ukrainian TV channels, they are showing exactly how it is … To say who started this war is very difficult. It is not a matter of opinion. For this one would need to know a lot of facts. But if one should sort it out, then I believe that Yanukovich started the war. Because students came to Maidan … because Yanukovich was adopting those laws and was robbing people … I have nothing in common with Aidar Battalion … It is hard for me to say anything about Odessa [the Odessa massacre] because I don’t remember a single picture. One would need to see it on the news. Simply I don’t remember pictures showing how it was there. I am not Odessite. I don’t know how it was there, if I had been there, then … Yes, I knew that I was not going [to war] for a walk … I am for equality. … But [as a captain] I was not in command. A sergeant was in charge [of my group], it was not me. I don’t have that qualification. … They say that a blunt pencil is better than a sharp memory; the most important thing is to know where to get information and not to remember it. … What they are showing us that’s what I watch. … To ask me about what separatism means is not a competent question for me, you need to ask Poroshenko or Yatsenyuk … No one can do anything. No one can do anything. … Of courses, losses are everywhere. … But I was not ready to sit in prison [if I refused orders] … [12]
Trivial, commonplace and vulgar, literally means belonging to the crossroads. Trivium is where three roads meet. As a symbol of man’s possible destinies and cardinal choices, the trivial then points not only toward a possible “banality of evil,” but also to a radical devaluation of one’s fate and its meaning—to the danger of falling for exchanging one’s mind for useless information and going down the road of the least resistance by making banal decisions and choices.
A man loaded with phrases, with blocs of phrases that are blocking his mind, loses a great deal of what it means to be homo sapiens, what it means to be alive and well. One certainly becomes adjusted, but adjusted in a very mediated way, which for McLuhan means to be “perfectly adapted to propaganda” and hence to oligarchy or a society of robots:
Propaganda cannot succeed where people have no trace of Western culture. …. [For] to talk about critical faculties and discernment is to talk about something far above primary education and to consider a very small minority. The vast majority of people, perhaps 90 percent, know how to read, but they do not exercise their intelligence beyond this. They attribute authority and eminent value to the printed word [the media], or, conversely, reject it altogether. As these people do not possess enough knowledge to reflect and discern, they believe—or disbelieve—in toto what they read. And as such people, moreover, will select the easiest, not the hardiest reading matter, they are precisely on the level at which the printed word can seize and convince them without opposition. They are perfectly adapted to propaganda.[13]
As one sees more and more students coming equipped and fully armed with clichés and then commensurately upset when this progressing phenomenon is pointed out to them (in a society of clichés, pointing out clichés is offensive), society also becomes more and more and ever better adjusted to rising Nazism as well. That’s also the point at which what was once liberal thought starts assuming a shape and taste of a corpse and hence also the tastes of fascism and its necrophilia and love of death.
With respect to the phrase “The Medium is the Message,” McLuhan’s son explains the inside joke encoded in it:
“The medium is the message” is pregnant with all kinds of meanings. My father used this phrase as the title of a book that came out in the late sixties. Only he gave it a little twist. He called the book The Medium is the Massage. There are four puns in that little phrase. First, “the medium is the message”—the familiar phrase. Split “message” into two words: mess-age. Every new medium makes a mess of the age. It messes up the current situation. The “message”: every new medium gives the culture a working over and a complete message—both unexpected and unwanted. Then split “massage” into two words: mass-age—The medium is the mass age, meaning our present media and mass audiences. So there are four levels of meaning in that title, and he intended all four.[14]
The media like the message then becomes an extension of the cloning of mass society, a society of robots. Coincidentally, the word robot is a neologism coined by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. The word is not just derived from the Slavic word robota, labor, but more directly from the word rob, which does not mean to rob; in Serbian, it means a slave. McLuhan’s own idea of these new robots via Western culture, media and technology means nothing less than “the suppression of … conscience, so as to remove all fear and circumspection … [so that] such a man becomes as the dead, who have passed beyond the necessity of taking thought about the proper course of action.”[15]
In this way, the robotic man then becomes adjustable to any prompt “instantly and without guilt.” He becomes an instrument, a flute and an ear that cannot help but obey the incoming tune.[16] The robot becomes the functional, efficient it, which is “freed … to respond to virtually any suggestion, especially of a sensuous or symbolic nature, and [is] a fair game for the non-rational self.”[17] The robotic man “easily falls into the dark”—into a “boundless, directionless” chaos in which “individualism is lost.”[18] Or, as McLuhan put it elsewhere, to be “well-adjusted” is to be a “user [who is] sound asleep.”[19]
When and inasmuch as this is achieved, the middle man and mid-level management—and the previous mediation standing in-between—could be then eliminated as well.[20] Thus, under globalization, “whole layers of middle management have been stripped out of both public and private sector organizations …”[21] As this progression is happening, the mediating role and screen of democracy and liberalism is also being withdrawn. Capitalism, originally established as the ascendancy of the middle class and a regime of the peddlers and middle men, is then not only changing as well, but it might also be entering its penultimate phase. In fact, “the reality of modern [late] democracy is that many political decisions are taken by small groups of highly qualified and knowledgeable individuals … in [their essentially] private worlds …”[22] In this way, a new, different landscape and order might also emerge—provided that one could still see it or form a true idea about it.
As McLuhan insists, this robot man is supposed to have his “(left-hemisphere) thinking atrophied.”[23] And we can add that, with the loss of left-hemisphere thinking, genuinely leftist thought and alternative would need to atrophy as well. When and once this happens, the world, as we know it, will pass, and a “second phase of the original creation” or a new world order will come.[24] In this world, new thinking and holism will emerge “controlled by a considerably smaller group of management elite;” and only “a small elite will become the guardian at the temple gate.”[25] The political implications of this transformation will “create a world government.”[26]
The “speed” and technology of the system will “inhibit the humanity ability to decode [it].”[27] “A new robotic corporate entity” will be the true constitution of this new world order—a point otherwise dutifully lost at the end of McLuhan’s chapter, “Global Robotism,” in the heap of other words on page 129. [28] And it is the ego trip and selfies which are taking us there—into that destination—for a ride.[29]
What political regime does best or most closely correspond to a society of such robot-slaves or the dead? Here both political thought and the crisis in Ukraine are presenting us with a potent answer.
Yet the message—”The Medium is the Message,” which has its own solid banalization literally programmed and projected into it—was, according to McLuhan, its author, not simply a comment or utterance, but an all-powerful formula, into which he folded a “new science” or even “the new science” of the media, technology, and “all human artifacts,” and its four categorical “laws” or four-fold negations of negations: 1) extension-amplification; 2) rendering obsolete or numb; 3) retrieval of what was previously lost or made obsolete; and 4) reversal or inversion when reaching the limit.[30] In other words, for McLuhan, “the Medium is the Message” was or is to be the Nomos of all the four Nomoi of everything that man ever did, does or is bound to do and, therefore, in its very essence, is nothing trivial or of little significance at all. The Medium is the Message is thus supposed to be not simply a method, but the universal, all-powerful method to all human wisdom and folly alike as well as the ultimate key to locking or unlocking mankind’s destiny as such.
McLuhan’s groundbreaking reflections on the media were taking place during the parallel and inter-related revolutions, which included: cybernetics, behavioralism in political science, the cultural revolution in the US (as opposed to the dead-end one in China), and, certainly not least, CIA-led MK-ULTRA mind control re-enslavement experiments built off the earlier work of Nazi experts (who were brought to the US after World War II as part of operation Paperclip).
As there is a method to madness as well as power, there is also a method to the Empire and its “managed chaos.” Briefly put, the method is to make us forget what matters most. When one forgets what matters, it costs less or very little (or even nothing at all) to buy a man. One might be bought for as little as a cliché. Furthermore, a man who does not know what truly matters would not be able to fight for what he does not know—for what really matters.
When, after World War II, the US became a global hegemon, the search and demand for the right scientific method (of knowledge, power, and control) produced in (American) political science a whole new discipline and requirement called “Research Methods,” a child of the “behavioralist revolution” and, in turn, the faux-revolution’s disciplinary enforcer. If one chooses to follow what one might call a British opinion on the subject –a comparatively more traditional or liberally oriented opinion (“political science in Europe used to defend its own comparative style and methods against US Hegemony”)—then reading in-between the lines, one could piece together from an otherwise mundane and typical textbook few considerably less trivial things than what is commonly taught about politics and its present-day mediations.[31]
From the get-go, the method fostered by American political science was putting a premium on universal uniformities, which required, as if in turn, that political thinking be focused on “immediate social problems” and “abandon great issues” for being too “unscientific.”[32] This meant again, as if in turn, to let “the method” displace or devalue substance. Method was to rule over content “even if [this] distorted reality.” Methods were supposedly “more robust than the alternatives.”[33] The new methodology or American political science (for most part), being thus oriented pragmatically, functionally, positively and optimistically, could not “entertain a commitment to ontological depth (hidden generative mechanisms in nature and society)”—not least because that’s where, in those darker, subversive waters, began Marxism and similar monstrosities.[34]
Rather than going dangerously too deep, the way has been open toward ever greater banalities and “an exercise that is ultimately meaningless.”[35] In this way, what is reproduced and recycled are “everyday assumptions of society, and these common perceptions and understandings are encouraged and reinforced by those with access to the media while [the rest is] discouraged as stupid, immoral and illegitimate.”[36] Chomsky quote
Clichés and slogans figuring as thoughts are thus presented as knowledge and common sense, and genuine thinking is greeted as irrational and impolite—it does not meet the method. A concentrated amount of such media, method, and political science, which place a main emphasis on presentation and spin, then produces “a mass,” a great gap between rhetoric and reality or a measured and shared stupidity.[37]
So while “the Medium is the Message,” whereby one may also say and mean nothing at all, the key to this expansive ambiguity conducive to trivia, clichés, and flat-footed stereotypes is, as just indicated, that great, serious issues and questions are lost and forgotten. The media and politics is then not unlike a man-constructed river of Lethe, which, when taken in, forces all to leak and waste the treasures of their minds and souls.[38] So what are these big, yet discarded and neglected questions, which we have forgotten to ask? And how is this forgetting through the insect-like buzz of the media and politicians relevant to or illuminative of what is happening in Ukraine?
Return of the Stranger and the Missing Meaning
One of the books, which I received as a little boy was Ernest Thompson Seton’s novel Two Little Savages Being Adventures of Two Boys Who Lived as Indians and What They Learned (1917). For some strange reason, one passage from the whole book made a lasting and unforgettable impression on me. It is an encounter between a boy and a stranger described in Chapter V, “The Colorless Stranger.” This is how it is introduced and how it unfolds:
Oh, sympathy! The noblest gift of God to man.
The greatest bond there is twixt man and man.
…
The ten times noble base of noblest love.
More deep than love—more strong than hate—the biggest thing
in all the universe—the law of laws.
…
Each year the ancient springtime madness came more strongly on Yan. Each year he was less inclined to resist it … How was it that the ponds all around should be full of them calling to him and playing hide and seek and yet defying his most careful search? The voices ceased as soon as he came near, to be gradually renewed in the pools he had left. His presence was a husher. He lay for a long time watching a pool, but none of the voices began again in range of his eye. … He located the spot within a few inches and yet could see nothing. He was utterly baffled, and lay there puzzling over it, when suddenly all the near Peepers stopped, and Yan was startled by a footfall; and looking around, he saw a man within a few feet, watching him. Yan reddened—a stranger was always an enemy; he had a natural aversion to all such, and stared awkwardly as though caught in crime. The man, a curious looking middle-aged person, was in shabby clothes and wore no collar. …
“F’what are ye fynding, my lad?” said he in tones whose gentleness was in no way obscured by a strong Scottish tang. …Yan said: “I’’m not finding anything; I am only trying to see what that Whistling Lizard is like.”
The stranger’s eyes twinkled. “Forty years ago Ah was laying by a pool just as Ah seen ye this morning, looking and trying hard to read the riddle of the spring Peeper. Ah lay there all day, aye, and mony anither day, yes, it was nigh onto three years before Ah found it oot. Ah’ll be glad to save ye seeking as long as Ah did, if that’s yer mind. Ah’ll show ye the Peeper.”
Then he raked carefully among the leaves near the ditch, and soon captured a tiny Frog, less than an inch long. “Ther’s your Whistling Lizard: he no a Lizard at all, but a Froggie. Book men call him Hyla pickeringii, an’ a gude Scotchman he’d make, for ye see the St. Andrew’s cross on his wee back. Ye see the whistling ones in the water put on’y their beaks oot an’ is hard to see. Then they sinks to the bottom when ye come near. But you tak this’n home and treat him well and ye’ll see him blow out his throat as big as himsel’ an’ whistle like a steam engine.”… The Pewee of his early memories became the Phoebe of books. … The stranger warmed, too, and his rugged features glowed; he saw in Yan one minded like himself, tormented with the knowledge-hunger, as in youth he himself had been; and now it was a priceless privilege to save the boy some of what he had suffered. His gratitude to Yan grew fervid, and Yan—he took in every word; nothing that he heard was forgotten. He was in a dream, for he had found at last the greatest thing on earth—sympathy—broad, intelligent, comprehensive sympathy. That spring morning was ever after like a new epoch in Yan’s mind—not his memory, that was a thing of the past—but in his mind, his living present.[39]
Like Seton’s or Yan’s colorless stranger, I think that I too can offer, after some years of reading and thinking, to share a shortcut of sorts and unveil the present, yet for most part disappeared “frogs” or great questions, which also happen to have a direct bearing to Ukraine. Two comparatively lost, neglected and otherwise forgotten big questions are enslavement and tyranny—however archaic or obtuse these questions might appear in the light of our today’s received clichés. These two are related, and I would argue that, without understanding these two, we can neither properly understand Nazism nor the deeper and darker forces at work in today’s Ukrainian crisis.
Thus, in his private letter to Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, the great late renovator of American political thought affirmed:
A science that cannot speak of tyranny with the same confidence with which medicine speaks, for example, of cancer, cannot understand social phenomena as what they are. It is therefore not scientific. Present-day social science is the inevitable result of modern social science and of modern philosophy … Once we have learned again from the classics what tyranny is, we shall be enabled and compelled to diagnose as tyrannies a number of contemporary regimes which appear in the guise of dictatorships. This diagnosis can only be the first step toward an exact analysis of present-day tyranny, for [resent-day tyranny is fundamentally different from the tyranny analyzed by the classics.[40]
So tyranny is one of the great and seemingly abandoned questions. Slavery is another. But slavery not as an area of historical antiquarianism or passing cultural anomaly, but as a systemic question linked to capitalism and, in fact, as Emmanuel Wallerstein noted, to “the central political tension” in the heart of the US itself:
We are facing the need to rethink and restate the conceptual frameworks we have inherited from the 19th century in order to under- stand and contribute meaningfully to the long world-systemic transition to socialism which has begun and in which we are living. The publication in 1974 of two major works on slavery in the United States has been an academic event. … The two books speak to, and are designed to speak to, the central sociopolitical tension of American national life: the systematic oppression of Blacks, its causes and consequences, economic, political, and social.[41]
From there, Wallerstein then goes to argue—against the established stereotypes and clichés—that enslavement did not or might not have been merely “transitional … but the heart and essence of capitalism [which] as a mode of production … [does also demand] coerced or semicoerced semiwage labor.”[42] The fact is that “the slave owners were indeed capitalists … they were operating in a capitalist world-economy.”[43] The difference between outright slave labor and wage labor was as much a matter of the force of resistance as a question of cost efficiency and the use of the state, i.e., its means of violence and control, to extract the largest share of the surplus value.[44]
The other singular, yet stereotypically downplayed fact is that capitalism took off with oversea colonization and the discovery of America, which became not only a place where Europe’s indentured and penal labor was shipped, but which also rediscovered and resumed slavery for the West as its key profitable business and political venture.
The fact (albeit now almost taboo) is that the much celebrated Constitution of the United States was a constitution of a slave state. By 1750, slavery was a legal institution in all of the thirteen American colonies.[45] From the 1630s till the American Revolution at the end of 18th century, between one half and two thirds of all European immigrants to America were indentured servants.[46] Besides counting slaves as two-thirds of a free person, the US Constitution had slavery as an institution inscribed in the Fifth Amendment of its Bill of Rights, which states that, “No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”—slaves were understood as property. This constitutional “right” was part of the legal basis for treating slaves as property with Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). President Lincoln confessed:
American slavery is no small affair, and it cannot be done away with at once. It is part of
our national life. It is not of yesterday. It began in colonial times. In one way or another it has shaped nearly everything that enters into what we call government. It is as much northern as it is southern. It is not merely a local or geographical institution. It belongs to our politics, to our industries, to our commerce, and to our religion. Every portion of our territory in some form or another has contributed to the growth and the increase of slavery. It has been nearly two hundred years coming up to its present proportions. It is wrong, a great evil indeed, but the South is not more responsible for the wrong done to the African race than is the North.”[47]
Slaves were a commodity that was sold, bought, or even rented. Furthermore, as McLuhan also pointed out, “the slave plantation was the original factory”—the original paradigm of capitalist efficiency.[48] For a while, the word capital competed for giving the name to the whole system against its kin chattel, which is, however, etymologically related to capital itself via Latin capital property.[49] As a term, chattel also applied to slaves. And it also so happened—and clearly for some grave reasons—that the most progressive capitalist leader, the US, was also the very last among Western powers to abolish slavery (by changing it into effectively indentured labor and apartheid serfdom), but only at the cost of a large civil war. If slavery receded, Wallerstein argues, it was then mainly because of the constraints of the geopolitical standoff between the US and the British imperial hegemony, which did not allow the US to externalize the “bulk of the cost of slave breeding” (i.e., by capturing adult slaves abroad, thus without having to pay the cost for the years of their upbringing).[50]
Exploring the ossified clichés of the system, Wallerstein also uncovered the strangeness of the very terms “bourgeois” and “middle class”: where there is a lie, there has to be a medium, which places us into the unreal—into a gap in front of reality. Speaking of the bourgeois, Wallerstein marvels:
In the mythology of the modern world, the quintessential protagonist is the bourgeois. Hero for some, villain for others, the inspiration or lure for most, he has been the shaper of the present and the destroyer of the past. In English, we tend to avoid the term ‘bourgeois’, preferring in general the locution ‘middle class’ (or classes). It is a small irony that despite the vaunted individualism of Anglo-Saxon thought, there is no convenient singular form for ‘middle class(es)’. We are told by the linguists that the term appeared for the first time in Latin form, burgensis, in 1007 and is recorded in French as
burgeis as of 1100. It originally designated the inhabitant of a bourg, an urban
area, but an inhabitant who was ‘free.’ Free, however, from what? Free
from the obligations that were the social cement and the economic nexus of
a feudal system. The bourgeois was not a peasant or serf, but he was also not a noble.[51]
As Wallerstein indicates, the bourgeois is assumed to be someone who is not a serf (the medieval analogue to the slave) and also someone who is supposed to be free from the nexus of the feudal system, into which he was born. The agent of the capitalist system is thus middling, mediated ambiguity.[52] The bourgeois is then like an Ariadne’s thread, but one that rather leads into a labyrinth of confusion than out of it.[53]
Confusion became mystification, which turned the bourgeois very much upside down or reversed as the sides facing us are reversed in the mirror. Both liberal and Marxist economics taught us to believe that capitalists are after profits as opposed to rents. The trivial, but denied fact is that rent is not an antithesis of profit; rent is the profit’s avatar, and “every capitalist seeks to transform [precarious] profit into rent,”[54] which would be as universal and as eternal as possible. Thus, instead of being the antithesis of feudalism, serfdom and slavery in general, the bourgeois is a master in the making: “the primary objective of every ‘bourgeois’ is to become an ‘aristocrat’”—who would own people as a source of his fixed rent.[55] And such rent is first and foremost political power. Its condition is a monopoly, i.e., a monopoly on violence. And it is this monopoly for which capitalists are striving.[56]
As rent-seekers, the capitalists’ goal is not freedom of mankind, it is mankind’s re-enslavement. To love money-making is to love people as tools, as commodities, as money, which is no love at all—it means to love people as extensions of one’s body, which can’t resist or oppose it.
Under the capitalist mediation, the tyranny of the means displaces the meaning. In a similar way, the media, means and “methods” replace and displace the heart of the matter—the art of thinking. Media are tied to the “middle,” but, originally, rather than being the middle or the heart of the matter, the word denoted not only what was in-between, but also the edge and the boundary. But the limit became soon a medium and then also the center of things, which it displaced.[57] Without right care and thinking, the media, the means, are set to decenter us from reality.
What would then be the most radical decentering of man and society? Man’s new re-enslavement, the loss of his thought that would allow him to oppose and resist this extreme threat.
But what was the original center, the center that held the whole together—if there was any? The measure of things used to be the thinking mind; the measure or modus is cognate with Greek médesthai be mindful, mémos spirit, purpose, intent, Latin mens mind, meditari to meditate, Old Slavic miněti to think, Sanskrit mánas mind. Moreover, the underlying essence of the mind was the idea of paying attention to (to “truly mean it,” we would say it in English today), caring and loving.[58] From thinking as caring or careful, loving thinking, we have also received our words for healing through medicine. In other words, not only is thinking a way of healing and loving, it originally also denoted “the knowledge of the best (true) course.”[59] Means and media are in this regard mediating, mediated thought by dis- and replacing it.
Media and mediocre share the same root, except that medium has also a sense of spirit and “enveloping substance or environment” or persons who “convey messages from and to dead people.”[60] In this regard, the media, modes, methods and means are also a figure not only of exchange, but of change, transformation or metamorphosis, which stand in a radical opposition to the immediacy of living thought and realization and through which we “advance” and are transposed and changed out of our own selves.[61]
While it is true that capitalism derives its name from a notion of head and principal, hence from something that is prime, principal, fundamental, and most important, one also needs to add that capitalism works by continuously destroying and displacing the “head,” principles and what matters or ought to matter by the dictatorship of the means, media, and money. In other words, capitalism is putting the means and the media in the place of the “head” (and ends) whereby the means and the media are not merely intervening in between or mediating, but they are also cutting off the audience from what is and from their own thought.
Under capitalism, man’s head, so to speak, and principles are exchanged (or shortchanged) for other things. More specifically, thought is replaced with cliché, idea with opinion, love with lust, and justice with apathy and a suspension of judgment and thought.
This process characterizes the very genesis of modern capitalism. While it is true that modern capitalism emerged together with new channels of communications, the making of the new system was more specifically tied to the displacement of the institution, the name of which capitalism expropriated and behind the name of which capitalism is hiding its truth—the market, which used to be a circumscribed, open, public, and regulated place of the community.
As Fernand Braudel abundantly shows, modern capitalism actually displaced the traditional markets and asserted itself once the old markets were vanquished by means of private (and intermediary) trading:
[Capitalism introduced itself] as a way of getting around the open or public market, which was closely supervised. The initiators of such private trading were substantial travelling merchants, peddlers and salesmen … That the newcomer with the many faces was detested, hated for his cunning, intransigence, and hart-heartedness is abundantly clear … This new kind of trade … was a revolution which went beyond the economy, into social behavior. … [The new traders were making business] “by whispering in each other’s ear, by speaking low or by signs, and in strange or hidden words.” … [They] contrived to anticipate [and thus pre-empt] the market, by going down the highways in search of the countrymen and relieving him of the goods he was bringing, to sell them at any price they please. … It is also perfectly clear that the labor market—as a reality if not as a concept—was not a creation of the industrial era. The labor market was the market upon which a man offered himself [or was offered by those who owned him] …[62]
Genealogically and politically, the bourgeois is also analogous to Aristotle’s nameless, cipher-like regime, “which is rarely found in practice [and is thus] overlooked” (Politics 1293a35). It is a mixture of oligarchy and democracy and, as such, is a product of “the method of mixing” or mediation (1294a30). The nature of this ambiguous “mixture” is dual; it is a mixture of freedom and wealth, which omits virtue (1294a9). Aristotle thus also calls it “the middle constitution” where a “mean conduct” by “a middle class” (hoi meson), could serve as “the best constitution for the majority of states and the majority of men whose virtue does not rise above that of ordinary people …” (1295a25).
While rare or unnoticed back then, this regime of the mediocrity was for Aristotle bound to serve eventually the majority of people in the majority of states as a form of middle political limbo, which would be “a mean open to men of every kind to attain” (1295a34). Mediocrity without virtue and the ability to tell things apart is then called “moderation,” thus implying that to have a virtue would be immoderate and, therefore, an act of wrongdoing. Moderation—in effect, the lack of virtue and understanding—is then also presented as what is best (1295b1, 1295b34). Such a middle regime encourages all to be “alike” (1295b13).
The desire or need for such an “intermediate constitution” stems from the prudently recognized need to accept this middle ground in the place of defeat, when the aim to rule over others is not realistically achievable under given circumstances (1296a22). In other words, this middle is possible and can be even relatively stable if the intermediate (we can say bourgeois) mediocrity (meritocracy of the mediocre) prevails both over those who “have a superabundance of good fortune, riches, friends … [and] la dolce vita” and those who, in contrast, “are greatly deficient in these qualities” (1296b34, 1295b13). The former “do not know how to be ruled in any way at all, and can command only like a master over slaves.” The latter are “too subservient; they do not know to rule, but only how to be ruled as a slave is” (1295b13). It would be thus also possible to see this political intermediacy not only as a happy mean or moderation, but also as a political stalemate, the continuity of which depends on the inability of the oligarchy to have all its wishes, its desire for slaves, come true. At the same time, the other key premise of the stability of this system is the political ignorance and acquiescence of the majority of the people. And such political ignorance is best made of false and hollow, thoughtless stereotypes and clichés that disable the spirit and the mind.
This middle ambiguity allows for protracted political and ideological confusion and ignorance where most people are deprived of the ability to know and tell which is which, confusing democracies for oligarchies:
When states became larger … the number of sharers in the constitution became larger. For this reason what we nowadays call ‘polities’ [the middle constitutions] were formerly called democracies. But the constitutions of those early times were, understandably enough, oligarchical or royal; owing to the smallness of the population their middle element was not large, and so, being neither numerous nor well organized, they were content to allow others to rule. (Politics 1297b12)
As Aristotle carefully indicates, a system where people are misled and deceived to mistake oligarchy for democracy meets his definition of the middle regime. It is a system where people of average understanding and little virtue are grown to be content to let others to rule since they assume that they live in a different regime than what is actually the case. They have been effectively and successfully demeaned by being sold a fiction of a better regime.
The sense of the underlying question of slavery and its mediation-cum-modification by money, modern culture, and technology is already sounded off in Marx’s and Engel’s Communist Manifesto. While Marx and Engels define “proletariat” as “the class of modern wage laborers … [who] are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live,”[63] the importance of wage quickly for them disappears and proletarians are quickly, repeatedly, and openly called “slaves”:
· Proletarians are nothing but a commodity.
· “Not only they are slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine …”
· Proletarians have “lost all individual character.”
· Such enslavement “obliterates all [their human] distinctions …”
· “They have nothing of their own …”
· The bourgeoisie rules by “assuring an existence to its slave within his slavery …”
· The proletarian is “a mere instrument of production.”
· Prostitution and proletarian labor belong to the same mode of subjugation and appropriation.[64]
As we can see, for Marx and Engels, difference between wage earners and slaves, i.e., the presence of a wage, quickly or rather immediately dissolves together with all the other human distinctions and qualities, which are denied to the “proletarians.” They are seen merely as tools, instruments, a commodity, and property. This is, indeed, a very radical reductionism and simplification, but this is also precisely what Marx and Engels claim for capitalism as a system in contrast to the liberals, as well as Hegel.
Marx and Engels argue that mediations have come to an end and with them also all moderations, intermediary gradations, veils, and illusions:
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie,” they argue, “possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonism. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, two great classes directly facing each other: bourgeoisie and proletariat. … In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, [capitalism] has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”[65]
While Marx and Engels do here injustice to the crucial importance and pervasiveness of mediation, and the modern media, in particular, their point indicates that slavery, and slavery spread and intensified in some new radical way, is the essence of the apocalyptic system. As a result, what has been hitherto “a more or less veiled civil war” is turning into an open and universal civil war, which is transforming a hitherto invisible or unseen ghost, a specter, into a real, open, and manifested power of the new “nether world.”[66]
In his writings on slavery and the Civil War in the United States, Marx did, moreover, foresee a possibility of slavery’s expansion under capitalism:
[Had there been] a peaceful surrender of the contested area to the Southern Confederacy … [the Union would be] reorganized, a reorganization on the basis of slavery, under the acknowledged control of the slave-holding oligarchy [Marx’s own emphases]. The plan for such a reorganization was openly proclaimed … The slave system would thus infect the whole Union. In the Northern states, where Negro slavery is, in practice, inoperable, the whole working class would be gradually reduced to the level of helotry. This would be in full accord with the loudly proclaimed principle that only certain races are capable of freedom, and as in the South actual labor is the lot of the Negroes, so in the North it is the lot of the Germans and Irish or their direct descendents. The present struggle between South and North is thus nothing less than a struggle between two social systems: the system of slavery and the system of free labor. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer peacefully coexist … It can only end by the victory of one system or the other.[67]
Under a closer scrutiny, we see that, as if out of the blue, Marx here sees two systems existing both side by side and against each other in the outward, apparent unity and homogeneity of the capitalist system. If, in The Communist Manifesto, the essential difference between these two systems and even the existence of this double was denied, here it is not only acknowledged, but an argument is made that, at a certain point, the otherwise denied, concealed, or trivialized existence of this double is bound to come to surface, the assumed unity of the system is to be ruptured, and the two systems—and not just modes or regimes—will fight each other to death.
Furthermore, in order to describe and understand this other system—the system of new universal slavery—Marx resorts to a term from ancient political thought (from where also comes the term “proletariat” by the way). Besides the concept of helotry borrowed from ancient Sparta, he also uses the term oligarchy. In this regard, it is noteworthy that this old political term of oligarchy and oligarchs was reintroduced into our political language mainly by the Russian people who spontaneously recovered this term for describing their new system and post-Soviet experience. People’s sense of reality and the need to call it with its proper name has thus bested the sterile political correctness and prevalent adopted clichés in contemporary political science and the learned circles of those who are paid to think and know. In fact, I myself was involved in a debate over the term “oligarchy” with some of these elite gatekeepers who are still convinced that the term should not be used because it is “not neutral,” because it is “biased” and thus inappropriate. As we will shortly see, for the people who rose against the Kiev regime, the principal issue is understood first as a struggle against Nazism and fascism and second as a struggle against oligarchy, which they see not only as a Ukrainian problem, but also as the problem of the whole world system. Their revolt against both Nazism and oligarchy is then commonly and spontaneously understood—despite and against the prevalent clichés and claims of present-day (American) political science—as the revolt against their enslavement by the self-same oligarchs and new Nazis.
In commenting on this great (and more or less suppressed) big question of the capitalist system (which, as we can see, actually contains and often conceals two systems), Marx further noted:
Anxiety to keep the ‘loyal’ slave/holders … in good humor and fear of driving them [away] … in a word, a tender regard for [their] interests, prejudices and sensibilities … have affected the Union with incurable paralysis since the beginning of war, driven it to take half-measures, forced it to hypocritically disavow the principle at issue in the war and to spare the enemy’s most vulnerable spot—the root of the evil—slavery itself.[68]
In addition, Marx also emphasized yet another essential tendency on the part of this capitalist oligarchy: “[T]he political spokesmen, lawyers, moralists and theologians of the slave-holders’ party had tried to prove not so much that Negro slavery is justified but rather that color is immaterial and that slavery is the lot of the working class everywhere”… incidentally, just as Marx and Engels were themselves arguing in their Communist Manifesto.[69] Under either favorable conditions or out of necessity, oligarchy grows powerful and/or radical enough not only to desire slavery, but slavery as expansive as possible.
Once oligarchy evolves or degenerates far enough to embrace slavery as its political, economic, and culture program, conquest and war to generate slaves as spoils of mankind becomes oligarchy’s business.[70] Oligarchy becomes an enslaving oligarchy when it becomes “unrestricted oligarchy.”[71] When that happens and in order to plan and carry out its hunting conquests, oligarchy turns toward tyranny and military dictatorship.[72] In the language of the 20th and 21st centuries, such oligarchy turns toward Nazism. To this effect, oligarchy abandons progressive republicanism and revolutionizes itself as an extreme reaction.
But, as long as oligarchy remains restrained and restricted or, to put it differently, moderated and mediated under the reign of liberal stereotypes and clichés about capitalism, “bourgeois society [is not yet] aware that the ghosts of Rome had watched over its cradle, since it [remains] wholly absorbed in the production of wealth and the peaceful struggle of economic competition.”[73]
As long as oligarchy needs society to stay safely “unheroic,” as long as it does not deserve its Nietzschean self-awakening toward a new beast-superman, oligarchy tries to present itself merely as house-management and emphasizes economics, depoliticizations, separation of politics and economics and its own civility and manners, which it requires from everyone else. Slavery requires enthusiasm and terror.
Before that moment of truth is reached, oligarchy remains limited and so does its “bourgeois content of [its] struggles.” But this also means that, as long as the link between oligarchy and enslavement stays in the dark, capitalist society uses self-deceptions needed to hide its deepest desires and nature. Until then, oligarchy repeats its former crimes and past mainly as a parody and farce, and the role of the media is supreme. When, however, oligarchy reaches the fullness of its time, so to speak, when it recovers its nether spirit again, then “the great historical tragedy” is born again, and reaction completes its full revolution.[74]
Elsewhere Marx describes such consummate, final oligarchy as the rule of financial capital which
makes its own laws, controls the state administration, exercises authority in all public institutions, controls public opinion … [in an] unbridled assertion of unhealthy and vicious appetites in permanent conflict with the bourgeois law itself … [in appetites] in which pleasure becomes debauched [crapuleux], in which money, filth and blood commingle.” Oligarchy in this terminal stage is “nothing but the lumperproletariat reborn at the pinnacle of bourgeois society [Marx’s emphases].[75]
Oligarchy gravitates toward slave-holding with money, filth and blood commingled by its own inner character—by its own class interest and spirit. Here it also needs to be pointed out that Ukrainian oligarchs under a special indulgence of Western oligarchy have reached through Maidan the very point at which money, filth and blood commingle.
Short of its ultimate self-realization, oligarchy needs in the interest of its self-preservation coverings and veils and, for each of its progressive “revolutions” (back to the past), a pretext as general and universal as possible: “The general pretext dulls the perceptions of [the other] classes; it enables [these other classes] to deceive themselves as to the [actual] character of the coming revolution, as to the consequences of [their] own deeds. Every revolution needs a banquet question.”[76] Liberal and democratic slogans usually serve as such pretexts.
The transformation of oligarchy into tyrannical, enslaving oligarchy and a new round of enslavement is also the meaning of Marx’s old enigma and apparent misquotation of Hegel about the doubling of history and the repetition of events as tragedies and farces, together with all the figures of the ghosts, spirits, nightmares, the dead, death-masks, disguises, and old imperial costumes. It was, indeed, a riddle worthy of either a Sphinx or an Oedipus.
http://vladimirsuchan.blogspot.com/2015/10/in-search-of-idea-ideology-of.html
This is a considerable work and I have broken it up bit for ease of handling. Have not read yet, I suspect it will be good fodder for analysis.