After Totality Introduction Something of global significance happened in 1990.

1 The collapse of the Soviet Union, one of the last bastions of high modernism, consummated the victory of the economic phenomenon of neoliberalism, and, with it, the social condition known as postmodernity. A cultural fragmentation fraught with uncertainty followed: the Belgian theorist Chantal Mouffe claims that at the end of 89 the collapse of the Soviet system was hailed in the Western World as the triumph of that idea of democracy, as the equivalence of public freedom, free market and the free choice by the individuals of their own way of life. But what happened after was exactly the contrary: the consensus on democracy as human rights + free market+ free individual choice vanished with the collapse of its enemy (Mouffe, Agonistic public spaces, 2011). Mouffe also introduces her book with Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, with a reference to the substantially new order (p. vii) of a world without the USSR. Likewise, in Doing Cultural Theory, David Walton identifies Jamesons conception of postmodernity as something first partially liberated by the New Lefts rejection of Stalinism, then fully liberated by the Soviet collapse . On the economic side, the Marxist economic anthropologist David Harvey writes in The New Imperialism: The collapse of the Soviet Union and then the opening up of China entailed a massive release of hitherto unavailable assets into the main stream of capital accumulation. What would have happened to over-accumulated capital these last thirty years if these new terrains of accumulation had not opened up? The post-Marxist Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek comments on the teleological aspect of this collapse and the inevitability of neoliberal expansion, remarking that 1989 marked not only the defeat of the Communist State-Socialism, but also the defeat of the Western Social Democracy (Living in the end times, p. 224). Laclau and Mouffe agree, in the introduction of their book commenting on the simultaneous collapse of Eurocommunism, (vii) a point that reflects the claim of conservative philosopher Roger Scruton that Europe will collapse as the Soviet Union did. Despite certain misgivings, the event, when it is not quietly swept under the rug, is usually invoked with an air of intellectual triumph over modernity only briefly interrupted by the apparent return to that benighted state precipitated by the terrorist attack on New York City in September of 2001. A few days after the attack, Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, said that Its the end of the age of irony, but any agreement he might have garnered at the time did not last long. The Bush dark ages are over, and the requiem for modernity has been once again sung, this time with conviction; we
1

The connection between postmodernism and so-called late capitalism has been much discussed. Fredric Jamesons Postmodernism, or: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism discusses the link in terms of cultural criticism; in Doing Cultural Theory, David Walton (p. 226) identifies Jamesons conception of postmodernity as something first partially liberated by the New Lefts rejection of Stalinism, then fully liberated by the Soviet collapse. Slavoj Zizek tends to focus on the apparent r adical liberation of choice precipitated by the collapse (The Leninist Freedom, 2001, p. 2), while Chantal Mouffe wri tes that at the end of 89 the collapse of the Soviet system was hailed in the Western World as the triumph of that idea of democracy, as the equivalence of public freedom, free market and the free choice by the individuals of their own way of life. But what happened after was exactly the contrary: the consensus on democracy as human rights + free market+ free individual choice vanished with the collapse of its enemy and introduces her book with Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony & Socialist Strategy with a reference to the substantially new order of a world with no USSR (p. vii). On the economic side, the Marxist economic anthropologist David Harvey, writes in The New Imperialism: The collapse of the Soviet Union and then the opening up of China entailed a massive release of hitherto unavailable assets into the main stream of capital accumulation. What would have happened to over-accumulated capital these last thirty years if these new terrains of accumulation had not opened up? (p149) Zizek, too, comments on the teleological aspect of this collapse and the inevitability of neoliberal expansion, remarking that 1989 marked not only the defeat of the Communist State-Socialism, but also the defeat of the Western Social Democracy (Living in the end times, p. 224). Laclau and Mouffe clearly agree, introducing their book with a remark on the concurrent failure of Eurocommnism (p. vii) and mirroring conservative philosopher Roger Scrutons claim that Europe will collapse as the Soviet Union did.

may conclude from this that the seeming rupture of 9/11 was transient or illusory. The late 80s and early 90s, we are told, provided an opportunity for reconsideration and for self-examination for people and governments the world round, from Mikhail Gorbachev, who dared to question the ideology of his birthright and found it petrified at best and at worst false, to the Left, which was forced to abandon statist conceptions of struggle in favor of decentralization and class struggle for intersectional identity politics, to the United States itself, which had its own brand of glasnost when it joined Third World antiimperialist movements in mocking jingo, Uncle Sam, and Yankee neoliberalism. This very act of questioning, so the story goes, precludes further anti-social, anti-consensus behavior: if the oppressor merely acknowledges to the oppressed that he is or has been oppressive, the ledger is cleared, a tabula rasa appears, and victor and victim begin free competition on a newly leveled field. In the post-1990 world, self-awareness is panacea and prerequisite. However, this feeling of liberal good will and human brotherhood through self-awareness has not manifested in any end of politics. War exists, geopolitics is practiced, and the world continues almost as it was, with no instantaneous erasure of older social and political forms. The process, slower than might be supposed, of deploying this universalized ! know thyself! in a world still woefully benighted by nationalism, dictatorship, conservative religion, and other collective evils is, both materially and within its own narrative, a second Enlightenment, directed partly at eliminating the remaining discrepancies between the French and English components of the first. Since Karl Marx and the first monarchists (the suffix implying other alternatives), intellectuals both on the extreme left and on the extreme right have commented on the material consequences of the Enlightenment, noting the restriction of its ideals in practice to the bourgeoisie and calling into question the good faith of that class. Capitalism and liberalism, the economic and cultural forms of the ideological substructure behind modern social practice, have been criticized from the inside, in a variety of contexts and toward a variety of ends, for the majority of their existence. While it is undeniable that the two, taken together, constitute an ideology which may itself be subject to critique, it must be emphasized here that liberalism is itself as much the originator of ideology as it is its own fiercest critic, constantly formulating older social forms in ideological terms while it substitutes itself for these newly-formed ideologies and thus revolutionizes society. Joseph Schumpeter, describing capitalism, coined the term creative destruction in his analysis of this process, tracing the course and direction of capitalist progress as follows: Capitalism [...] is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary. [...] The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates. [...] The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation [...] that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in. *+ In breaking down the pre-capitalist framework of society, capitalism thus broke not only barriers that impeded its progress but also flying buttresses that prevented its collapse. That process, impressive in its relentless necessity, was not merely a matter of removing institutional deadwood, but of removing partners of the capitalist stratum, symbiosis with whom was an essential element of the capitalist schema. [... T]he capitalist process in much the same way in which it destroyed the institutional framework of feudal society also undermines its own. (1994)

That capitalism (and by extension, liberalism) undermines its own earlier forms, and that this process of self-undermining is the essential fact of capitalism, is a datum as necessary to the comprehension of modernity and of postmodernity as to that of capitalism. Early modernity imposed itself on earlier social forms through the ruthless ideological critique of traditional praxis; currently, after the events that culminated in the Soviet collapse of 1990, postmodernity is participating in the vicious critique of late modernity, with international forms of neoliberalism supplanting earlier, statist liberalisms (and also, as will be argued, illiberalisms). Consciousness of this process, which is typified by the postmodernist intellectual movement, is in fact encouraged by capitalism, accelerating as it does the self-criticism or self-undermining of capitalism which is fundamental to creative destruction. This creates a dilemma in which illiberal and noncapitalist critique of capitalist society seems impossible. However, certain strains of Marxism have propagated productive critiques of capitalism, and in some cases have even managed to revert or eliminate its material symptoms. Its success has been, in every case, based on certain alterations of the state form in the service of Marxism, with a totalitarian strain of modernity as its output. This totalitarian Marxism detained the process of creative destruction in its ideological tracks, producing frozen and illiberal forms of Enlightenment ends and, ever more forcefully rejected by the more immediate and capitalist heirs of the Enlightenment, becoming a modernity with few claims to the early modernist tradition and none to the postmodernist. The critique of capitalism so produced therefore eliminates the Schumpeterian cycle of self-criticism, instead acting as a brake on a process that only exists insofar as it advances. The two Marxisms The origin of this brake can be found in certain subtle contradictions within the Marxist tradition. Since the inception of the socialist state there have been two Marxisms. While the methodology of Karl Marx the historian is generally consistent, Marxs few assertions about communism, to the effect that it emerges from capitalist society, the new world being found through the criticism of the old, left a powerful ambiguity in the Marxist schema. To state it in more or less trite terms, there can be taken on the one hand the position that capitalism will collapse under its own contradictions whether or not efforts toward socialism are undertaken; on the other, there is the militant or Leninist position that capitalism can be strangled in the cradle, or, less commonly, arrested during its industrial or financial phases. The former, it must be noted, shares materially all goals with capitalism, and is indistinguishable with it in praxis. Current in the first world from midcentury on, it has enjoyed resurgence since the fall of the Soviet empire. The latter position, taken by Lenin, was the characteristic methodology of the various socialist states, and its practical ends are very different. To reiterate, central to the distinction is the question of urbanization. Lenin, against the Social Democrats, Rosa Luxemburg, and his colleagues Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, all of whom had espoused the theory that capitalism had to be fully developed before socialism could arise,2 interrupted the process of enclosure, establishing instead the kolkhoz system described previously. Urbanization in Russia and Eastern Europe ceased to be accelerated by the monetary pressures of capitalism; rather, the relationship between city and countryside was mediated by the central planning of the Soviet state. Subsequently, this state funded a number of socialist and anti-imperialist projects, nearly all in countries with a very high peasant population, the goal universally being to recreate Lenins statist brake on the process of industrial
2

http://books.google.com/books?id=xrG55J9wI2UC&pg=PA19&lpg=PA19&dq=lenin+%22the+time+was+not+right%22&source= bl&ots=qQiwVGt47B&sig=AG120W27ppDbj7f7wMCKL5h96EY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=yUwUejbL4rb0wGFoICwDg&ved=0CD0Q6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=lenin%20%22the%20time%20was%20not%20right%22&f=false

capitalization. The relevant methodology, Soviet Marxism-Leninism, is sometimes conceived of as having little to do with Marxs utopian vision, a view that is only partially accurate. Marx himself exhibited growth as a historian over the course of his life, with the more idealist endeavors of The German ideology eventually giving way to a kind of midpoint between this idealism and Leninist praxis, the question of the peasant becoming ever more prominent in his work as he began to research the peripheries of capitalism as it existed in his time. Nonetheless, aside from these later exceptions, if we are to determine Marxs stance on precapitalist society, we must turn to his purely historical account of it. Following Geoffrey Ernest Maurice de Ste Croix,3 we find the Marxist account of serfdom limned out in the following few passages. On the European middle ages, Marx writes: The peasant serf, such as he, I might say, until yesterday existed in the whole East of Europe. The peasant worked, for example, three days for himself on his own field or the field allotted to him, and the three subsequent days he performed compulsory and gratuitous labor on the estate of his lord. (Wages, Prices and Profit ix, in MESW 211) This labor was extracted, too, by other than economic pressure,4 that is, by a legal system enforced by the military, rather than by the pressures of capital. That said, Marx specifies that this forced labor is not an integral part of serfdom, as he also calls the serf self-sustaining in Leibeigenschaft mit Fronarbeit. It is in light of this last term that Albert Szymanski, delineating the various social classes, is so careful to emphasize that the peasant and the serf by definition own the means of their reproduction, whatever the apparent legal status of the land. In 1852, in The eighteenth brumaire of Louis Napoleon, describing a more contemporary situation, although one in which monetarization had already taken its toll on peasant self-sufficiency, Marx wrote: Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homonymous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/hist-mat/18-brum/ch07.htm Engels, in 1848, had interviewed numerous peasants in the French countryside, documenting the emergence of what the Soviets would have called a kulak and carefully distinguishing between the peasants who survived on their own labor and those who cannot manage without wage-workers (MESW 637). Peasant property (as opposed to that of kulaks) was defined by Marx as not only distinct from capitalist private property, but the direct antithesis of the former, which grows on its tomb only,5 while the peasants who gradually acquire the possibility of accumulating a certain amount of wealth *are+ themselves transformed into future capitalists.6 By Lenins time, the small peasant, so far had the degree to which the kulaks needed to hire him progressed, lived "... not by the land, not by his farm, but by working for wages.... He... has ceased to be an independent farmer and has become a hireling, a proletarian". (Vladimir I. Lenin (1900): The development of capitalism in Russia; p. 265-67).Thus it is important to distinguish between private and personal property. Peasant property was self-sustaining
3 4

Cf. Class struggle in the Ancient Greek World, pp 159-211. http://libcom.org/files/feudalism%20to%20capitalism.pdf note 31 5 59 6 Pdf72

and necessary only to the reproduction of life; in fact, the peasant was so directly attached to the land that he was (whether serf or not) tied to the soil as its accessory, bondage, in the true sense of the word.7 It may be at this point objected that this placid, frozen state of affairs was antithetical to Marxist conceptions of progress, but we find quite the opposite in the following passage: Take it, for instance, that the enforced labor for the landlord originally amounted to two days per week. These two days of enforced labor per week are therefore fixed *.+ But the productivity of the remaining days of the week, which are at the disposal of the direct producer himself, is a variable magnitude, which must develop in the course of his experience *+ The possibility is here presented for definite economic development taking place.8 Whether he would have considered this economic development a prerequisite for capitalism, or something altogether independent of the process of enclosure described by E. M. Wood, it is impossible to say. But the fact of his interest in the relative communalism and economic independence of the peasantry is impossible to deny. Additionally, as mentioned, Marx developed an interest in the existing peasantry and its prospects toward the end of his life. By 1881, writing on the Russian peasant, for example, he provided the following assessment: Russia is the sole European country where the agricultural commune has kept going on a nationwide scale up to the present day. It is not the prey of a foreign conqueror, as the East Indies, and neither does it lead a life cut off from the modern world. On the one hand, the common ownership of land allows it to transform individualist farming in parcels directly and gradually into collective farming, and the Russian peasants are already practising it in the undivided grasslands; the physical lie of the land invites mechanical cultivation on a large scale; the peasants familiarity with the contract of artel facilitates the transition from parcel labour to cooperative labour; and, finally, Russian society, which has so long lived at his expense, owes him the necessary advances for such a transition. On the other hand, the contemporaneity of western production, which dominates the world market, allows Russia to incorporate in the commune all the positive acquisitions devised by the capitalist system without passing through its Caudine Forks. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/03/zasulich1.htm The early output of Marx operated upon the assumption that the capitalist process was already more or less complete; as Marx grew older, however, he became more aware of the importance, and of the scale, of its outliers. It is by alliance with these same outliers, the majority of Russians, that Lenin brought about the Bolshevik revolution, depending on the fact of their being driven out of existence to bring his project to fruition. Over the course of the following decades, rather than being driven out of existence entirely, they were preserved as a class by the relatively slow advance of Soviet agricultural industry and the countrys necessary agricultural self-sufficiency until the late Brezhnev years (cite), their labor on the kolkhoz directed into the support of the cities through the juridical and non-economic means of the Party, precisely as it had been (by Marxs account) before the first agricultural reforms. Against these tendencies toward a peasant-inclusive Marxism, as apparent in the Soviet Union itself as in the peasant militias it funded in Vietnam and Korea, we may contrast the Marxism of the accelerationist type that more directly follows Marxs narrative of progressive economic advancement eventually leading to communism. Since the collapse of the USSR, works like Marxs revenge by
7 8

MEW XXV.79 791 Pdf 37

Meghnad Desai have proclaimed the resurgence of this Marxism, according to which the acceleration of capitalism itself will lead to communism, as enthusiastically as Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history. Marxs revenge describes how "the October Revolution, by its survival, appropriated Marx, and guarded its monopoly of his heritage with ferocious, and, indeed, murderous tenacity,"9 and how it left Socialist Internationalism *+ in tatters.10 The Bolshevik version, Desai writes, became the only version of Marxism.11 Yet it was to be all for naught. In 1991, capitalism had survived, - not only survived, but become a worldwide phenomenon yet again, for the first time since 1914. It showed a capacity for technological advance with promises of more to come.12 The sorry episode13 of the Soviet Union should be forgotten as quickly as possible. The advent of the twenty-first century, he continues, is thus a beginning as well as a resumption. The world has come back to where it left off in 1914. Capitalism was stalled by the Soviet experiment, yes, but this stalling only held it back longer from completing its takeover, and, thus, eventually becoming obsolete. Since the ancient/classical, as well as the feudal, modes lasted a thousand years each, Desai asks provocatively, why did anyone think that a much more productive mode would disappear in a mere century or two?14 Desai immediately recognizes that Capital fails to come up with a single story about the dynamics of capitalism that in any way predicts even with various conditions attached its eventual downfall.15 Marx never made it clear whether it would be a falling rate of profit which eventually brings about the collapse of capitalism, or the revolt of the working classes, or both."16 Whatever the cause, Desai is a firm believer in progress. Capitalism, he writes, is a profit-driven system of accumulation and incessant search for new technologies to increase productivity. As such it is prone to cycles, crashes and panics. It is the best arrangement for the alleviation of poverty and misery, even as it destroys jobs and restructures economies."17 As it overcomes state socialism, according to Desai, it unleashes these advantages upon an increasingly globalized world. Desai believes that he sees the first phenotypical markers of an upcoming evolution in democratic organizations like the WTO, which he distinguishes from more hegemonic or imperialist institutions like the IMF. The end of the twentieth century marked not just the end of the challenges to capitalism as a mode of production, he asserts, but, along the way, imperialism, both continental and maritime, lost out as well"18 The logic of the post-1945 global order, symbolized by the IMF/World Bank, is in contradiction with the market-led logic of this new phase of capitalism,"19 as symbolized by the WTO. He continues his explanation: Trade is a reciprocal relationship, and the WTO requires all its members to agree to extend the Most Favoured Nation clause to all countries they trade with. Reciprocity and symmetry are thus at the heart of the WTO process. Its structure is the most egalitarian of any of the international institutions - one country, one vote.20 While the nostalgia for older international institutions may be forgiven, this is a strange conclusion to an apparently Marxist work. That this species of Marxism is coterminous with capitalism is undeniable.
9

Meghnad Desai, Marxs Revenge (New York: Verso, 2004), 2. Desai, Marxs Revenge, 8. 11 Desai, Marxs Revenge, 42. 12 Desai, Marxs Revenge, 44. 13 Desai, Marxs Revenge, 44. 14 Desai, Marxs Revenge, 52. 15 Desai, Marxs Revenge, 79. 16 Desai, Marxs Revenge, 81. 17 Desai, Marxs Revenge, 304. 18 Desai, Marxs Revenge, 306. 19 Desai, Marxs Revenge, 305. 20 Desai, Marxs Revenge, 311.
10

Against this Marxism, a Marxism of acceleration, in which socialism arises from an ever more perfect totality of capitalism, we may postulate, with reference to the Soviet one, a Marxism in which the eternally incomplete nature of the capitalist project is emphasized. Against postmodernism, which focuses on the fullness of the spectacle, we can accentuate its gaps, those collectivities that have not yet succumbed to bourgeois individualism. Through this emphasis, we can localize and predict the epicenters of creative destruction, the earlier presumptions of liberalism (from the bourgeois family to the State itself) which are currently in the process of being consumed and recycled by an ever broader individualism, like the preliberal social forms, generally agrarian, attacked in the same way. The identification of these points, and the precise differences they have with their liberalized or more liberalized versions, can have as much relevance in the tracing of the course of liberalism as in the preservation and revitalization of a Marxism completely different from the postmodern one. The evolution of liberalism Armed, then, with this Marxism, we can postulate a chronology of liberalisms ever broader and more coherent that continually replace one another over the course of the history that begins with the creation of the ideology. After Schumpeter, it becomes possible to identify the ways in which older forms of liberalism contain the seeds of their more developed versions without ceasing to be quantifiably less liberal than their descendants. In this way, we may say, Kant is less liberal than Rawls, French absolutism is less liberal than the US democratic party, nationalism as it survives is less liberal than postmodern internationalism, etc. Furthermore, these older and less liberal forms of liberalism exist contemporarily with the more evolved and hegemonic form, and are under constant attack by it. Secular arab nationalism, initially conceived as a compromise with liberalism against Muslim traditionalism and communism, is a typical example: as Soviet power weakened and eventually failed, the same Western powers that had supported this state form began to implement the same protest tactics of color revolution and invasion that it had used against the Eastern bloc. The reaction of the leaders of these nationalist movements in their condition as fresh meat for creative destruction can clarify much. The Arab nationalist Bashar al-Assad, under attack by the US and its allies, had an interview with the journalist Hala Jaber in 2013: Syria has been fighting adversaries and foes for two years; you cannot do that if you do not have public support. People will not support you if you are detached from their reality. A recent survey in the UK shows that a good proportion of British people want to keep out of Syria and they do not believe that the British government should send military supplies to the rebels in Syria. In spite of this, the British government continues to push the EU to lift its arms embargo on Syria to start arming militants with heavy weapons. That is what I call detached from reality when you are detached from your own public opinion! *+ What is beyond hypocrisy is when you talk about freedom of expression and ban Syrian TV channels from the European broadcasting satellites; when you shed tears for somebody killed in Syria by terrorist acts while preventing the Security Council from issuing a statement denouncing the suicide bombing that happened last week in Damascus, and you were here, where three hundred Syrians were either killed or injured, including women and children - all of them were civilians. Beyond hypocrisy when you preach about human rights and you go into Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and kill hundreds of thousands in illegal wars. Beyond hypocrisy is when you talk about democracy and your closest allies are the worst autocratic regimes in the world that belong to the medieval centuries. This is hypocrisy! (al-Assad, 2013) The vocabulary used in general by Assad belongs to the early Enlightenment - these are the words of a man who still believes fundamentally in "human rights," in the "public opinion" and "reality," and who cannot understand the "hypocrisy" of the Western powers w/r/t these shared principles. The

presumption is that any appeal to the values established some years ago by the liberal West could create a common ground on which the Western powers would realize the error of their ways, that they are funding "terrorist acts" against " public opinion, "and so on. According to the logic of creative destruction, however, Assad, as a nationalist, is now obsolete, and no appeal to the principles of the Enlightenment can save him. Insofar as these earlier liberalisms survive, and the process of creative destruction moves on without them, they are presented with a dilemma: either they have to become increasingly illiberal and so isolated from the international community, or have to sacrifice themselves to a more contemporary liberalism. Although, as noted, their vocabulary can remain identical to those of their enemies in the international community, the praxis of these projects is increasingly totalitarian, and has less and less to do with any material form of liberalism. With Marxism, in the Leninist sense, this process was completed very rapidly during and after World War II and, therefore, Soviet communism is the most important example of aborted creative destruction made modern illiberalism, for reasons which will be analyzed in greater depth in the third chapter of this work. Marxism, unlike the secular nationalism that it influenced, had some initial advantages, including its unilateral and persistent focus on the recent development of capitalism, and not on the more meritocratic and hierarchical institutions (such as the military, the state and the modern church) that are the least ideological facets of modernity, that is, the part that has least to do with bourgeois revolution. However, as will be argued, the preservation of these surviving older modernities, and the refusal to participate in their postmodern mockery, has a powerful ability to restrain and even abort the material development of the teleologies responsible for liberalism and capitalism. Moreover, an ecumenical approach to socialism, which recognizes and develops the full material potential of anticapitalist thought, can lead to a modernity with the capacity for productive and adequately mediated dialogue with the remains of premodern and traditional forms of life. I Totality is undone Esse and ens The comprehension of modernity in general, of its ideological and material genealogy and that of the interlocking functions of liberalism, capitalism and Protestantism in its beginnings, is a prerequisite to the comprehension of its complexities and gaps. Modernity, as it was conceived during the Enlightenment, is a European production, because of which the transition from precapitalist and preliberal social relations to liberal capitalism will be given special attention. Two events, one more cultural, the other more economic, will be here emphasized as essential to this transition, the Protestant Reformation and the English enclosure laws that marked the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The role of the Reformation in the production of a secular modernity in Europe sometimes appears contradictory, as no sooner had radical Protestantism analyzed and replaced Catholic totality than it was itself analyzed and replaced by secularism. That there is continuity between Protestantism and liberal secularism is determinable from a mere glance at the chronology, but why exactly Protestantism which was hyperregulatory and fundamentalist in its inception led to the seeming permissiveness of secularism is a subject infrequently treated. The American historian Brad S. Gregory proposes to explain the process in his The unintended reformation: How a religious revolution secularized society. Among

various other claims, Gregory isolates the philosophical core of the transition (and the originating idea behind both Protestantism and secularism) as the relatively recent idea that Gods existence is subject to the same terms and by-laws as human existence on Earth: ''The book is on the table'' and ''God is in heaven'' are not comparable statements in traditional Christian metaphysics. But beginning in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, influential thinkers reinforced the default tendency in discourse about God and in effect made them comparable. (Gregory 2012) Hildegard of Bingen had written that God was incomprehensible in all things and above all things, while Thomas Aquinas called God so otherly other that he was above all improperly knowable, insisting that he did not belong to any Aristotelian genus of creatures (Gregory 2012). Gregory refers to this distinction as the two meanings of the word to be: God, before the fourteenth century, was an esse, not an ens, a to-be rather than a being. While this does not directly explain the Protestant tendency toward antimaterialism, including the rejection of the sacerdotal priesthood, of sacrament in general, and of the depiction of the body of Christ, what it does explain can be extrapolated from the issue of transubstantiation. The pressure placed on the Catholic Church to explain transubstantiation in positivist terms led eventually to a split between Protestants who insisted the act was a symbolic ritual merely designed to recall the Last Supper and Catholics who were forced to insist that there was something literal about the tradition (Gregory 2012). If God exists, not as something immanent but as something removed and external, and no ritual can achieve the Divine, there is something fundamentally empty about any collective act or ritual of worship but this is not central to Gregorys argument, and we will return to the matter later. The real issue, according to the historian, is that it caused an irreversible breach between the theological and the scientific unprecedented by the more dialectical medieval approach. The theological, insofar as was possible, was reduced to its essence, a matter of individual belief, the particularities of which were just as much subject to scientific analysis as any other untested axiom (Gregory 2012). Science, therefore, took on the characteristics of an objective universal that medieval Catholicism had once possessed. Gregory concludes, quite correctly, that none of this was necessary, and an industrialized modernity could just as easily have occurred had no artificial cordoning-off of positivist science been effected, had God continued to have been seen as ultimately unknowable and the rituals, the communal and social Christian ethos, been preserved (Gregory 2012); still, this seems to describe only one facet of a complicated problem. Gregorys genealogical work clearly explicates the stages of Protestantization and later of secularization. He explains the effects of sola scriptura as follows: The Bible, I say, the Bible only, is the religion of Protestantsl the English theologian William Chillingworth famously declared in 1638. This is indeed what Chillingworth and many other Protestants said but what did the Bible say? That was the question, to which so many incompatible answers were given-and with so many ramifying consequences, precisely because Christianity in the early sixteenth century was not a discrete set of beliefs and practices called religion separated off from the rest of human life, but an institutionalized worldview that shaped all its domains *.+ Scripture officially interpreted by hermeneutic authorities and backed

by political authorities led to confessional Protestant cities, territories, and states, whether Lutheran or Reformed Protestant (including the Church of England), which stipulated, imposed and policed their respective versions of what the Bible said in a manner analogous to Catholic political regimes. Scripture alone, on the other hand, without an alliance between anti-Roman reformers supported by political authorities, resulted in a vast range of conflicting and irreconcilable Christian truth claims. (Gregory 2012) Gregory argues that this hyper-pluralism of truth claims induces a situation where religion becomes a matter of individual consumer choice comparable to eating and shopping, (Gregory 2012) but to be against pluralism qua pluralism, and to treat it as a purely moral issue, is to tread dangerous political ground. Rather, it might be more fruitful to ask pluralism in the service of what? What John Rawls attempts to deny, that every pluralism is really a federalism with an official beneficiary, is as abundantly clear in the aftermath of the Reformation as it in the aftermath of the Gorbachev administration. The first beneficiaries, as seen in the above quotation, were the Protestant churches and their local political allies; later, however, these lost power to the same ideological forces they had unleashed to gain it. A more Marxist reading of events might explain the matter somewhat: first Protestantism, then secular liberalism, were ideological tools meant to expand the privileges and freedoms of European citydwellers, expanding their power until it exceeded that of the local aristocracy and transformed them into an international class with no superior to answer to, not even God. The science and scientific improvement that had become their rallying cry, free from any Christian moral or Aristotelian ethical influence, was to justify agrarian capitalism (which improved the land), industrial capitalism (which improved the city), colonialism (which improved the people), intervention (which improved the world), and so on, each new act of improvement legitimizing and expanding their domain. Beginnings of individualism The analysis of Protestant tactics in effecting the ideological shift is far from exhausted. Just as Gorbachev had to invoke Lenin, creating a perceived gulf between Lenins historical words and deeds and the contemporary socialist state he governed, Protestant reformers referred to the Bible in order to draw a line between Christ and Christendom that had never previously existed. Christian customs not explicitly prescribed in the Bible from the prohibition of usury to the Mass itself were called into question, and the recommended replacement was always further introspection, private prayer and a reading of Scripture not mediated by a Catholic priest (Gregory 2012). Protestant emphasis on the ideal over the material, and the private over the traditional and public, had its precedent in several preCatholic heresies: Manichaeism, Gnosticism, and to a lesser degree Donatism (though the latter bears more in common with Savonarola and Jansen) had all rejected the material world in one way or another during the early days of Christianity (Bokenkotter 2005). Their shared presupposition, that the material world was irreducibly evil and that introspection was the only way to human freedom, had been countered by Augustine with a more subtle and differential approach to evil, one that would only be reinforced with the later popularization of weekly confession (Bokenkotter 2005). Although Augustines City of God did contrast the material with the theological, opposing the holy City of God to the venal City of Man, he emphasized, as the American historian Thomas Bokenkotter puts it, that the two cities are

eschatological realities that overlap in history and will only be separated from each other at the end of time (Bokenkotter 2005, p. 81). Therefore, on Earth, the theological and the material are inextricably and dialectically linked, making it impossible to condemn the material alone, or to extract meaningful praxis from doing so. Likewise sin and virtue in contrast to the Donatists, who demanded an impossible level of virtue from their religious representatives, Augustine proposed a slow, laborious anabasis toward goodness that took into account mans foibles and weaknesses, promoting a Christianity that was inclusive but emphasized a collective teleology of virtue (Bokenkotter 2005). Furthermore, where the Donatists had altogether denied forgiveness to formerly apostatic priests, Augustine emphasized the importance of forgiveness on the condition of penance and reformed behavior (Bokenkotter 2005). This approach to good and evil resulted, over the ages, in what Bokenkotter calls a Church that aimed to embrace all men and that traditionally offered a saving grace in its sacraments that was available to all, and that always taught that human effort counted for something in the work of salvation (Bokenkotter 2005, p. 272). This sacramentality was central, as was the role of Church as mediator between the theological and material, ever since the Council of Trent had laid down that Scripture must be interpreted according to tradition, which it defined as the way Scripture was interpreted by the Fathers of the Church (Bokenkotter 2005, p. 262). Over time, however, what had previously been unthinkable to call into question the integrity and even authenticity of this mediator gradually came into practice. Even before the first Protestants, reformists like Girolamo Savonarola, uncomfortable with ecclesiastical corruption, began to propagate their critiques in venues increasingly external to the Church. Savonarola, a semi-mystic and self-proclaimed enemy of the Church who operated in Renaissance Florence, succeeded in mobilizing police forces to patrol the citys youth for sodomy and immodesty and passed laws to strengthen the artisan and bourgeois classes against papal and Medici influence, presaging the authoritarian Protestant regimes later fostered by Calvin and his ilk.21 He was excommunicated and hanged for his insubordination (Rubinstein 1963). His legacy resurfaced in the 16th century with the appearance of John Calvin and Cornelius Jansen, the former explicitly Protestant, the latter not, whose doctrine of predestination raised doubt about the usefulness of the Church mediatrix. Both Calvin and the French Jansenists accused the Church, and the Jesuits especially, of a lax moral standard that was incompatible with Christian teachings (Vidmar 2005). Calvin eventually became head of the Protestant moral revival in Geneva; during this time, when Michael Servetus, a heterodox theologian experiencing some persecution by Catholics, stopped in Geneva, expecting to find refuge, he was instead executed.22 This commitment to orthodoxy albeit an orthodoxy that was explicitly opposed to Catholic tradition and claimed to use only Biblical scripture as mediator which initially manifested itself as an authoritarianism even more stringent than the prior one, presages the radical element in bourgeois revolution, which should not be considered with the continuation of totalitarian social relations.
21

"Compendium of Revelations," translated in Apocalyptic Spirituality: Treatises and Letters of Lactantius, Adso of Montier-enDer, Joachim of Fiore, the Franciscan Spirituals, Savonarola ed. Bernard McGinn (New York, 1970) 211-270. and Nicolai Rubinstein, "Politics and Constitution in Florence at the End of the Fifteenth Century," Italian Renaissance Studies ed. E.F. Jacob (London, 1963). 22 The Heretics: Heresy Through the Ages by Walter Nigg. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1962. (

Heaven and earth The discrediting and undoing of church mediation, which precipitated early modernity, were neither total nor definitive; some cases of successful regulation of dissidence can be found during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Liberal histories tend to center themselves exclusively on the struggle of individual dissidents, identifying them, sometimes correctly, as standard-bearers of modernity. The case of Galileo Galilei, a typical figure in this narrative, merits a closer examination. Christopher Hitchens, a typical figure in this narrative, lionizes him in the following passage: We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earthcentered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge. (2011) This assertion, in addition to being hopelessly reductive, ignores certain historical facts about Galileos life. First of all, Galileo was not the first man of science to propose a heliocentric model. Rather, he was a proponent of the theories of Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish mathematician and cleric who had received little ecclesiastical criticism for the publication of his findings (Vidmar 258); most denunciations of Copernicuss work were in fact Protestant.23 With this in account, it becomes clear that Galileos quibble with the Church was more political than scientific in nature. His first publication on the subject having been well-received by the Inquisition, Galileo was however asked by Pope Urban VIII to present arguments both for and against heliocentrism in his next publication. Galileo mocked the request with the inclusion of a thinly veiled caricature of the pope by the unfortunate name of Simplicio, whose thin arguments the physicist easily demolished.24 Only then did Galileo stand trial for heresy (Vidmar 258). The lionization of Galileo as individual, so apparent in Hitchens statement, is the direct result of the further loss of power to Protestantism experienced by the Church and the subsequent hagiographies written on its first dissenters; however, a distinctly different mode of scientific investigation suffuses the life of the more orthodox Copernicus. More generally, the reductionist history of Galileo as a genius struggling against a corrupt institution typifies the dichotomy drawn by liberalism between governmental totality and individual innovation; according to the liberal narrative, a discovery cannot be truly positive unless it causes a great deal of controversy among representatives of a Church or a State. One necessary conclusion from this premise, of course, is that private enterprise better understands how to disseminate new scientific understanding and technology than does some omnipotent organ of religion or mass government, an idea taken for granted by the disciples of radical capitalist individualism. History is rewritten in individualist terms; clerics, peasants and bureaucrats are discounted in favor of protestors and bourgeois revolutionaries, the injunction to call into question every collectivity destabilizing even liberal social forms in the ongoing process of creative destruction. On a more theoretical level, the proposition at the heart of Pope Urbans appeal, to emphasize the contemporary
23

Edward Rosen (2003). Copernicus and his successors. Hambledon Continuum. And Calvin's Attitude Toward Copernicus by Edward Rosen, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Jul. Sep., 1960), pp. 431441 Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press 24 Finocchiaro (1997), p. 82); Moss & Wallace (2003), p. 11)

impossibility of knowing the truth of either heliocentrism or geocentrism, exemplifies the intentional ambiguity common to Catholic dogma and even presages the later physical concepts of relativity and frames of reference. A positivist reading of events the controversy as one between darkness and light, ignorance and scientific progress obscures the subtleties of history for the sake of liberal ideology. The Catholic Church, unlike the Orthodox, has maintained since the East-West schism a certain dialogue with Greek thought, especially with that of Aristotle, which attempts to reconcile faith and reason on semi-philosophical grounds. The Western preoccupation with belief and logical development of the same has never found a strong parallel in Eastern Christianity, where the strict maintenance of tradition in materially unchanged form dominates (Runciman 7). The debate over the Filioque, a Western innovation that eventually exacerbated the schism almost beyond repair, is often cited as an example of Western logical development over Eastern insistence on tradition (Runciman 31). In Catholicism, faith and reason are dialectically intertwined, with the Church as mediatrix; in Orthodoxy faith exists entirely apart from, and superior to, reason, being the sole domain of the Church. As Gregory argued, Aquinass distinction between esse and ens relegated God, and his will, to a scientifically untouchable plane (a position not unlike the Orthodox one); Duns Scotus, however, rejected this distinction, most importantly asserting that essences, and purely spiritual substances, do in some material sense exist and can be subjected to Aristotelian categorization (cf. Ordinatio 2, d. 3, pars 1, qq. 16), as well as tracing out a theory of individualism that definitively heralded early modern methodology (http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/articles/Scotus_on_Singular_Essences.pdf). The latter was developed by William of Ockham, who took the position that all universals exist only within the individual human mind. Ockhams parallel fideism and rationalism, the final breakdown of the Churchmediated faith-reason dialectic, were predicated on the individual and therefore definitive for early modernity. He wrote: Only faith gives us access to theological truths. The ways of God are not open to reason, for God has freely chosen to create a world and establish a way of salvation within it apart from any necessary laws that human logic or rationality can uncover. (Dale T. Irvin & Scott W. Sunquist. History of World Christian Movement Volume I: Earliest Christianity to 1453, p. 434.) As writers like Ockham increasingly rejected the role of Church as mediatrix, she became increasingly defensive and reactive, no longer able to define the terms of any argument. To generalize, after the moment of Protestantisms creation, Protestant factions would introduce some new dichotomy and place the Catholic Church on one side of it; generally, the Catholics would accept this placement and fight for the other side. In some cases, however, especially with Vatican II, they came to mimic the Protestant innovations in their own rites. The debate over transubstantiation is an example of the former; the argument over whether the sacrament is literal or figurative is framed entirely in the positivist terms innovated by Protestantism. Other examples include latter-day Catholic pronouncements on ensoulment and papal infallibility. This failure of the Western Church to reassert itself as mediator has gradually given way to the disintegration of the dialectic established by Augustine and has opened the way for Protestant pluralism and for capitalist modernity in the West. Any analysis of capitalism and Protestantism therefore must examine with a critical eye the claim that this disintegration gave way to a kind of ideal liberty: instead, we must apply the terms of Schumpeter, and

thus locate the new masters that were created when the old ones were destroyed. These overlords, the members of a growing international bourgeoisie, go on destroying meritocracy in the name of meritocracy, equality in the name of equality, and subsistence itself in the name of progress.

II The age of tyranny Genealogy of the word Tyranny, writes Fredric Jameson, meant the ancien rgime; its modern analogue, totalitarianism, intends socialism. The words origins in Greek demagogy during times of inefficient aristocratic management are well known, but it went nearly unused for over a millennium after the decline of the Greek city-state. At the close of the seventeenth century, in his Essay Concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil Government, John Locke revived and redefined the term for the Enlightenment era. Tyranny, he wrote, is the exercise of power beyond right, which nobody can have a right to; and this is making use of the power any one has in his hands, not for the good of those who are under it, but for his own private, separate advantage. A materialist conception of history insists that to approach any radical critique of previous forms of social organization on its own terms is never enough; rather, it is necessary to locate the concurrent shifts in power that facilitated and, dialectically, were facilitated by the critique, and to isolate its enactors and beneficiaries. In this case, Lockes definition of tyranny as the willful ignorance of right obscures his tautological definition of right itself, leaving it as a kind of open but hegemonic signifier whose meaning has shifted significantly since Lockes time, though always in the same direction and in service of the same political ends. Its next major appearance can be found in the American Declaration of Independence, which reflects Lockes conception of a tyrant as an exceptionally power-hungry individual in its claim that the history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. Thus far we have seen the important component this redefinition of tyranny forms in the narratives that helped to unleash the revolutionary force of bourgeois republicanism, but in its next historical incarnation the term sets in stone the limits of bourgeois revolution. Maximilien Robespierre, who had so recently defended his dictatorship as a revolutionary war *that+ must be waged to free subjects and slaves from unjust tyranny, soon encountered a Thermidorian Reaction that arrested and executed him to universal cries of bas le tyran! The reversal illustrates the paradox of bourgeois revolution, whose radically egalitarian rhetoric justified the worldwide shift in power from aristocracy to bourgeoisie, but ultimately contained the potential to exceed the limits of its inceptive purpose, forcing the rhetoric to turn back in upon itself and decry a revolution which no longer served its progenitor class. When the limits are exceeded so far as to establish a social order in which the bourgeoisie has been completely eliminated as a class, as occurred after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the cries of tyranny! become even more fervent. One is accustomed to hearing the Soviet institution described as a monarchy and communism as a religion; in fact, in terms of rhetoric and tactic, it would be difficult to distinguish the bourgeois revolutionaries of 1990 from those of 1776. Rather than accepting their rhetoric, however, and tracing the source of these parallels to the madness of a few megalomaniac individuals (Lenin, Stalin, etc.), it might be more useful to examine the economic configuration of the USSR, limning out some of the profound differences between the Second World and both the First and the Third. In order to do so, however, certain aspects of early capitalism must be made very clear. While Locke was writing his Essay,

a social shift was occurring, which, while profoundly linked with his conception of right, might at first glimpse seem eminently opposed to it. The British historian and heterodox Marxist E. M. Wood provides what is probably the best overview of the process in her The Origin of Capitalism. In short, she argues, the Enclosure Laws of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, which rendered common law giving peasants collective usage of land obsolete in favor of private ownership, were the solitary sine qua non of the capitalist mode of production. She writes: *L+and had t o b e liberated from any *+ obstruction to *early capitalists+ productive and profitable use of property. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, there was growing pressure to extinguish customary rights that interfered with capitalist accumulation. This could mean various things: disputing communal rights to common lands by claiming exclusive private ownership; eliminating various use rights on private land; or challenging the customary tenures that gave many smallholders rights of possession without unambiguous legal title. In all these cases, traditional conceptions of property had to be replaced by new, capitalist conceptions of property - not only as 'private' but as exclusive. Other individuals and the community had to be excluded by eliminating village regulation and restrictions on land (something that did not, for example, happen in France in anything like the same ways and degrees), especially by extinguishing customary use rights. The newly landless peasants, who were previously more or less self-sufficient and had only utilized money and the market as opportunities rather than imperatives, were forced into newly built factories and newly industrialized farms. They began to pay rent, and bought their daily bread whether or not they continued to grow it. This legal change accompanied by the monetarization of rural life was, of course, repeated throughout Europe and eventually the world, but the peculiarly British origin of capitalism is a historical point seldom argued by orthodox Marxists in whose view the downfall of feudal relations was globally inevitable. One might compare the British introduction of a hut tax in various African countries during the late imperial period, a tax which cost more to collect than the revenue it brought in: collecting rent, even in tiny quantities, from a people to whom shillings were still unknown and useless caused an immediate monetarization that facilitated an immediate transition from agrarianism to wage-labor. In this light, it becomes perhaps a little easier to see how Lockes criticism of power beyond right could be used to illegitimize common law just as easily as it could be used against the monarchy custom, under Lockes liberalism, is no defense against the hard facts of bourgeois law, existing, as it does, outside of the domain of right and reason. While Locke was personally against enclosure of the commons, in his philosophy one may see the germ of the philosophy that led to it. He writes: But since gold and silver, being little useful to the life of man in proportion to food, raiment, and carriage, has its value only from the consent of men, whereof labour yet makes, in great part, the measure, it is plain, that men have agreed to a disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth, they having, by a tacit and voluntary consent, found out a way how a man may fairly possess more land than he himself can use the product of, by receiving in exchange for the overplus gold and silver, which may be hoarded up without injury to any one; these metals not spoiling or decaying in the hands of the possessor. This partage of things in an inequality of private possessions, men have made practicable out of the bounds of society, and without compact, only by putting a value on gold and silver, and tacitly agreeing in the use of money: for in governments, the laws regulate the right of property, and the possession of land is determined by positive constitutions.

Money, according to Locke, is so natural to man that it exists outside the bounds of society, having precedence and seniority even to government. Likewise, the buying and selling of land for private use, integral to a burgeoning bourgeois property law, is part of Lockes pre-societal consensus in the state of nature, its claimed continuity with nature setting the stage for the golden age of real property about to begin. Simultaneously and somewhat bewilderingly, Locke claimed that labor, industry and improvement ultimately determined the right of the land, a claim which might seem to run in favor of the peasants. Wood clarifies: It is worth dwelling for a moment on this concept of improvement, because it tells us a great deal about English agriculture and the development of capitalism. The word 'improve' itself, in its original meaning, did not mean just 'make better' in a general sense but literally meant to do something for monetary profit, especially to cultivate land for profit (based on the old French for into, en, and profit, pros - or its oblique case, preu). By the seventeenth century, the word 'improver' was firmly fixed in the language to refer to someone who rendered land productive and profitable, especially by enclosing it or reclaiming waste. Agricultural improvement was by then a well-established practice, and in the eighteenth century, in the golden age of agrarian capitalism, 'improvement' in word and deed came truly into its own. This rather Calvinist conception of improvement (the theological aspects of this transition will not be ignored) in any event provided the philosophical basis for the ensuing race to extract as much money from the land as possible, inevitably accompanied by a financialization of the economy, the reappearance of usury, and, finally, with economic pressure forcing other countries to turn more profit than mere feudalism could ever produce, the spread of these market imperatives to the rest of the world. One by one, all the worlds countries repeated the process, forcing at least some of their peasant population into factory labor in order that they might compete on the industrial stage. It is at this point worth reiterating certain basic facts of human existence that have in recent times been obscured by the process of capitalization. Most importantly, city life is the exception, not the rule; a very high degree of peasant surplus is necessary to support any kind of urban development. It is conservatively estimated that in Greek and Roman antiquity at least ten peasants were necessary to subsidize one city dweller25 and, while this figure depends on the crop farmed, the fertility of the soil, and a number of other factors, only the advent of industrialization made any significant dent in this ratio, expanding the cities and making possible for the first time large geographical areas lacking any kind of food self-sufficiency. As technology improved, enclosure and therefore urbanization advanced. In 1800, a mere 3% of the worlds population lived in urban areas; now, as of 2008, the worlds population is evenly divided between urban and rural populations.26 Historically, written production has been limited to the cities, providing us with a cultural record that obscures this total lack of continuity between the modern and premodern demographic. When one thinks of ancient Greece, one thinks of the city-state, neglecting to consider the small minority of Greeks that city-dwellers constituted; in fact, a large proportion of those city-dwellers, in turn, belonged to a slave class that served as mediator, extracting surplus (and, occasionally, subsistence) from the surrounding countryside for the use of the urban population.27 The unconscious assumption that urban life is somehow default extends to our view of feudalism, under which the lack of social mobility and other bourgeois liberties for the majority of the population one must not forget that bourgeois originally means urban is often attributed more to some political motivation on the part of the ruling class than to the simple economic impossibility of
25 26

Ste. Croix. http://www.prb.org/Educators/TeachersGuides/HumanPopulation/Urbanization.aspx 27 Ste. Croix.

maintaining large urban populations without either the slave system of antiquity or the machinery of industrial capitalism. As mentioned before, the demographic shift brought about by enclosure dialectically facilitated and was facilitated by a great deal of literature extolling the bourgeois liberties; but it is important to remember that those liberties went undiscovered for so long for economic and technological reasons, not as a consequence of the oppression of one ideology (liberalism) by another (autocracy). III On totalitarianism It is at the point of enclosure, in fact, that we find Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks during the revolution of 1917, with the declining Tsarist regime gradually succumbing to this economic pressure and commencing the transition to capitalism. At this moment, several notes regarding their material and ideological situation will be of utmost importance. First of all, Marxism, the ideology of the Bolsheviks, was at that time broadly Luxemburgist, with most interpreters of Marx taking his theory of successive modes of production to mean that only the most developed countries those in which the peasant population was practically non-existent and most people were working-class had the potential to experience socialist revolution. Luxemburg and others wrote passionately in favor of accelerating the process of enclosure in capitalization on the assumption that this would bring the inevitable proletarian uprising which was, incidentally, to be international closer. This internationalist, anti-statist, First Worldist conception of Marxism presages the postmodern version of the ideology that would reassert itself in 1990, fully consistent with the written work of Karl Marx but identical to radical capitalism in praxis. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, took swift advantage of Russias postrevolutionary power vacuum, using the kairos swiftly to build up the skeleton of what had previously been considered a contradiction in terms a Marxist version of the state. Luxemburg, in fact, wrote several outraged letters to Lenin, claiming the opportunity had not been right and that the Bolsheviks had created an institution that offended nature and common decency. But the deed had been done, and the fledgling USSR consolidated its absolute power over the economic activity of the countries it encompassed. The Russian Civil War had actually briefly reversed the urban migration brought on by enclosure, with the cities starving forced back into agricultural activity to survive. Lenins initial consolidation and collectivization were soon supplanted by the explicitly temporary New Economic Policy (NEP), which permitted small businesses to operate under a plan of partial nationalization. Urban migration, which had begun under the Czar, was allowed to resume once the cities had recovered their food supply lines, with Lenin abstaining from changing or repealing the laws of privately-held real property. Monetarization was allowed to resume, and taxes were collected.28 Lenin expected the policy to last decades, but it ended with his death, after which the Soviet process of industrialization and accompanying collectivization of the countryside was conducted by the administration of Joseph Stalin, mainly under the supervisorship of Yevgeny Preobrazhensky. The Oxford economist Robert C Allen has written an illuminating summary, a self-described postmortem of the USSR which he entitled Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution.29 Briefly, Allen explains, agricultural surplus was invested in heavy industry, the proceeds from which would be reinvested in more heavy industry, creating an initial momentum of expansion prior to any demographic shift. Meanwhile, collectivization of the peasantry the elimination of the kulak class, combined with the institution of the kolkhoz, a kind of industrialized neo-corve under which a certain amount of work for the collective
28 29

Find Reference here. P 1 for postmortem

farm was required, beyond which the peasant could work for his own sustenance increased their output significantly, producing an enormous surplus, which, in turn, subsidized the growth of the urban population. Simultaneously, this surplus created conditions under which a certain portion of the peasant population was rendered redundant, and, in a process mirroring but not replicating enclosure, that portion migrated into the cities. In a final, much shorter discussion of post-Stalin economic policy, Allen notes that a peculiarity of this migration was its singular or aorist nature: the urban and rural populations subsequently stabilized, and no subsequent waves of city-bound peasants were seen. This contributed to, but was not wholly responsible for (the arms race is correctly pinpointed at the ultimate cause of collapse)30 the decline in industrial growth seen in the 1970s and beyond, when urban population percentages hovered around 65%.3132 The bureaucratic management of the country, which prioritized autarky despite considerable subsidization of peripheral and Soviet-aligned socialist countries,33 contributed to the relatively stable population ratio with its policy of full employment, rendering the very idea of free labor essentially moot. Stefan Hedlund describes the arrangement as something like an enormous corporation.34 No real market existed; rather, goods, raw and finished, were transported according to a vast bureaucratic system that oversaw every aspect of production from extraction to delivery. The kolkhoz, like the factory, was a company without capitalism, which had to be managed and regulated, its surplus transported according to government decision. Soviet industrialization thus bears a complicated relationship to capitalist industrialization that is both disguised and defined by the way in which it created its working class. One of the most important divergences is the elimination of the kulaks. The kulak had been, until the turn of the 20th century, virtually nonexistent; in fact, it was only with the Stolypin agrarian reforms of 1906, which mimicked English enclosure laws in their abolition of the obshchina or commons in favor of private ownership, that the term came into use.353637 Had the Russian Revolution been bourgeois and capitalist, the kulak, a
30 31

Blackshirts and reds, search smaller industrial base Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_Soviet_Union Find source later 32 This is, of course, above the world average, but comparison to the first-world countries and a consideration of the stability of the percentage will clear up the point. 33 Szymanski, Is the Red Flag Flying 34 Stefan Hedlund, Russia's Market Economy: A Bad Case of Predatory Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1999), 35.
35 36

Richard Pipes (1 September 2001). Communism: A Brief History. Random House Digital, Inc.. pp. 39-Karl Marx wrote of the obshchina: Russia is the sole European country where the agricultural commune has kept going on a nationwide scale up to the present day. It is not the prey of a foreign conqueror, as the East Indies, and neither does it lead a life cut off from the modern world. On the one hand, the common ownership of land allows it to transform individualist farming in parcels directly and gradually into collective farming, and the Russian peasants are already practising it in the undivided grasslands; the physical lie of the land invites mechanical cultivation on a large scale; the peasants familiarity with the contra ct of artel facilitates the transition from parcel labour to cooperative labour; and, finally, Russian society, which has so long lived at his expense, owes him the necessary advances for such a transition. On the other hand, the contemporaneity of western production, which dominates the world market, allows Russia to incorporate in the commune all the positive acquisitions devised by the capitalist system without passing through its Caudine Forks. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/03/zasulich1.htm 37 Andreyevna(see below) While "neoliberals" look toward the West, the proponents of the other "alternative tower," to use Prokhanov's expression, the "protectionists and traditionalists," are striving "to overcome socialism by regression," in other words, by reverting to the social forms of presocialist Russia. The spokesmen for this variety of "peasant socialism" are fascinated by this image. In their opinion, the moral values accumulated by peasant communes in the misty fog of the centuries were lost a hundred years ago. The "traditionalists" certainly deserve credit for what they have

peasant who owned enough land that he had to hire other peasants to work on it, would have gone on to bear the standard of agrarian capitalism, turning enough of a profit from his small holdings to accede into the bourgeois class. Instead, he was systematically eliminated by the Red Army. Secondly, while the institution of the kolkhozh did not constitute reintroduction of the obshchina, the reinstitution of collective usage of the means of production ran in contrary to all previous, capitalist versions of industrialization. The previous comparison of the kolkhozh to the corve, which had existed in Russia for the majority of peasants and serfs under the name of barshchina, is to be taken seriously, but (since its laborers were usually paid in grain or in coin) a more appropriate designation for the kolkhoz might be that of synthesized obshchina-barshchina, the socialist merger of corve and commons. The state of the Soviet working class was considerably different from the state of the working class of the capitalist countries. Western visitors to the USSR often commented on the barren state of its supermarkets, failing to understand the alimentary situation of the non-tourist. Most or all worksites served meals in an on-site cafeteria.38 These cafeterias operated 24 hours daily, and the meals they served cost a small fraction of a ruble. Additionally, almost all companies included a cheap factory store, where most groceries were purchased. Lastly, factories also produced food on-site, usually maintaining a vegetable garden and small livestock farm.39 In addition to on-site food access, almost all workplaces housed health centers.40 These fixtures, in combination with the highly collectivized apartments inhabited by all urban Soviet citizens,41 contributed to what was, in effect, a version of urban modernity that was completely distinct from the capitalist one. Where, under capitalism, cities are typically centers of trade, mobility, and other forms of social flux, urban life in the Soviet Union was nearly as localized as in the countryside. As in agrarian life, the line between workplace and food source was consistently blurred. This is not to say that social mobility was nonexistent a relatively consistent and predetermined career track did not preclude active membership in the Party. At any given time, of the highest members of the Central Committee, 80% came directly from the laboring classes.4243 The conventional wisdom that bureaucratic corruption, in the monetary sense, was rampant throughout Eastern Europes socialist history is highly disputable. The accumulation of wealth in the
done for the exposure of corruption, the fair solution of ecological problems, the struggle against alcoholism, the protection of historical monuments, and the opposition to dominance by mass-culture, which they correctly evaluate as consumerist media.
38

Food At Work: Workplace Solutions For Malnutrition, Obesity And Chronic Diseases. Christopher Wanjek. International Labour Organization, 2005, p. 327. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 An American in Leningrad, Logan Robinson, W W Norton & Co Inc (April 1984). 42 Blackshirts and reds
43

One is tempted to recall Karl Marxs pronouncement on the medieval Catholic church: In a similar way the circumstance, that the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages formed its hierarchy out of the best brains of people without regard to estate, birth, or wealth, was one of the principal means of fortifying priest rule and suppressing the laity. The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the most prominent men of a ruled class, the more solid and dangerous is its rule. Grundrisse V.XXXVI.22

Soviet banking system, let alone in foreign bank accounts, was well-nigh impossible, so any corruption that existed was limited to the petty benefits of direct consumption.44 Even Yuri Andropov and Leonid Brezhnev lived in moderately sized apartments for the duration of their premierships.45 Michael Parenti reports that in the German Democratic Republic, party heads were paid $725 a year and lived together in a small suburban housing complex with a shared pool.46 The highest earners in the USSR made about five times as much as its lowest earners; the ratio in the United States is 10,000:1.47 Dangerous jobs paid more; a coal miners income was higher than that of an engineer.48 Conventional wisdom about industrial inefficiency must also be put to the test. Had Soviet industry been brought up to US levels of efficiency, the increase in GDP would have been two or three percent at most.49 Stagnation notwithstanding, the Soviet economy at the time of its collapse was healthy, life expectancy was increasing, and Western observers, so far were they from predicting a collapse,50 expected the Soviet economy to surpass the North American one in the mid-eighties.51 Finally, all of this was accomplished with a very high degree of self-sufficiency. Less than 2 percent of the Soviet net material product had its origins in trade with the West, which was mostly the sale of raw materials like gold.52 The absence of capitalism from the USSR was even a mystery to those whose job it was to restore it. The American economists or Harvard boys under Jeffrey Sachs, Andrei Shleifer and Anatoly Chubais assigned to facilitate the Russian transition to capitalism were advocates of the Coase theorem, an economic axiom stating that so long as private property exists and is well-protected, rational selfinterest will naturally rebuild a market economy from the bottom up.5354 The identity of the initial possessor of property, then, becomes effectively irrelevant. The economists proposed a system of vouchers to be handed out, for small nominal prices or for free, to the general working-class population. These vouchers could then be used to purchase shares in mutual funds or in previously public enterprises.55 Shleifer referred to this project as spontaneous privatization.56 As he said himself, its chief advantage was its sheer rapidity.57 The idea was appealing in its logical simplicity, since there could be no logical reason to resist the free vouchers. Additionally, on the surface, it seemed more Marxian than even the dead Marxist state: as Shleifer pointed out, they, not Lenin, were granting the people collective ownership of the means of production.58 However, Shleifer approvingly notes that, over time,

44 45

Hough, Logic, 106. La camisa negra y la roja, Parenti (search bananas) 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Szymanski 49 Look up when internet comes back 50 Ofira Seliktar, Politics, Paradigms, and Intelligence Failures: Why So Few Predicted the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2004), p.125-129. 51 Acemoglu and Robinson (2012) "Why Nations Fail", pp. 128. 52 Szymanski 53 Shleifer, Transition, 151. 54 Hough, Logic, 70. 55 Shleifer, Transition, 163. 56 Shleifer, Transition, 162. 57 Shleifer, Transition, 159. 58 Shleifer, Transition, 152.

full worker ownership would likely result in the maintenance of the Soviet system, but that most workers, especially the poor, will probably have sold their shares already59 and a capitalist meritocracy will have emerged. It is this last note that reveals the true course the plan would take. In a time of severe financial uncertainty, the selling off of vouchers was very rapid indeed. Since the accumulation of wealth was quite difficult under socialism corruption usually being limited to articles of material consumption, with Swiss bank accounts completely unknown the pool of Russians with money and financial expertise was tightly restricted to representatives of the former black markets. According to a former deputy premier, Chubais realized the owners will mostly be criminally oriented people. But, he said, there are no others.60 Under the Coase theorem, this made sense, since the fact of ownership should override any possible criminality on the part of the owners, and competition, after all, would erode monopoly over time. Yeltsin addressed the monopolization problem by claiming that the change in legal structure would give rise to innovative small enterprises in the first months of privatization.61 However, in the short term, the potential gains to be had from competing for existing industries far outweighed the prospect of the slow struggle of developing a small business in a frankly chaotic economy.62 Furthermore, the new businessmen-mafiosos cozy relationship with the new Russian government made it undesirable for either party to promote diversification.63 Ultimately, amid skyrocketing inflation, falling life expectancies and standards of living, mass unemployment and corruption on an unthinkable scale, even the projects sponsors began to reconsider. Alan Greenspan later said with some regret: Much of what we took for granted in our free market system and assumed to be human nature was not nature at all, but culture. The dismantling of the central planning function in an economy does not, as some had supposed, automatically establish a free market entrepreneurial system. There is a vast amount of capitalist culture and infrastructure underpinning market economics that has evolved over generations: laws, conventions, behaviors, and a wide variety of business professions and practices that has no important functions in a central planned economy.64 Keeping Yeltsin in power, and maintaining the illusion that the transition to capitalism was going smoothly, would eventually require the buying of several elections and the laundering of more than three trillion dollars.65 The difficulty with which capitalism was reintroduced illustrates not only the falsity of the classical liberal assumption that capitalism is natural to human beings but also the sheer lack of it in the Soviet Union at the time of its collapse. Under the influence of Maoism, many on the Western left had taken to calling the Soviet Union revisionist, implying that capitalism had been

59 60

Shleifer, Transition, 163. Hough, Logic, 70. 61 Hough, Logic, 72. 62 Ibid. 63 Hough, Logic, 104. 64 Jerry F. Hough, Logic of Economic Reform in Russia (Washington, DC: Brookings University Press, 2000), 4. 65 Stefan Hedlund, Russia's Market Economy: A Bad Case of Predatory Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1999), 135, 202, 256.

restored already under Khrushchev.66 This fits nicely into the narrative of Chubais, for whom the black marketeers represented the hidden truth of Soviet life. It does not, however, match up with the facts. The black marketeers were a small, explicitly criminal group who, prior to glasnost, were entirely subject to Party norms and expectations. They, and those who used their services, were tolerated, but never legitimized. Despite their financial position, any attempt to obtain recognition or override Party rule would certainly result in arrest. It was not until the IMF and other institutions of transition handed them the reins to the country that they became the arbiters of truth in post-Soviet Russia; before that, they amounted to little more than well-off pariahs. The idea that some genuine truth lay obscured at the heart of a web of Party lies extends to all facets of Soviet life. The Russian anthropologist Alexei Yurchak, interested in how retrojection tends to color Soviet life in memory with an artificiality which was not present at the time, published his findings in a work entitled Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Yurchaks argument is as follows: Soviet citizens adherence to Soviet linguistic and cultural norms was not merely performative, but believed; only after perestroika and the subsequent collapse did their performance of Soviet life seem strained or even feigned. Although the systems collapse had been unimaginable before it began, he writes, it appeared unsurprising when it happened.67 Only with the introduction of an alternative, fully-formed weltanschauung (and accompanying lebenswelt), that of Western capitalism, could Eastern Europeans actually conceive of an alternative to Soviet socialism, whether or not they had participated in its mockery or had taken an ironic approach to participating in its responsibilities. Citing Mikhail Epstein, Yurchak provides us with three propositions to that effect: that Soviet authoritative language was hegemonic and constituted the only representation of reality that was shared by all Soviet people; that from the audiences perspective language had only one function: to describe reality and state facts about the world *+; that how adequately language described reality could not be challenged or verified.68 Citational or intertextual references to the words of Lenin and Stalin regulated a complex system of permissions and injunctions which were, paradoxically to the postmodern reader, sometimes bypassed but never questioned.69 One interviewee claimed that the building of Communism is the task of my life,70 but was known regularly to use the black market to buy banned rock records. Yurchak writes: After the 1950s, with the disappearance of the external voice that provided metadiscussions and evaluations of [official Soviet] language, the language structures became increasingly normalized, cumbersome, citational and circular. The language became what I termed hypernormalized. This development was an unintended result of the attempts by great numbers of people who were engaged in producing texts in authoritative language to minimize the

66

http://www.bannedthought.net/USSR/RCP-Docs/SUSoSI/SUSoSI-Szymanski-Main.pdf

67 68

Everything was forever, 1 Everything was forever, 76. 69 Everything was forever, 66. 70 Yurchak, 225.

presence of their own authorial voice. By doing so, they converted their voices from that of the producer of new knowledge to that of the mediator of existing knowledge.71 Totality rather than totalitarianism this is what Yurchak and Epstein propose as a model for their version of Soviet society. Where totalitarianism is something external, imposed on the liberal subject from without, totality, as Yurchak argues, is continuous with the subject, lacking a true inside. Subjects of such a system may engage in irony toward it, even as they lack any real conception of what life on the outside would entail. When Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev decided, in the late eighties, to show the public the inner truth of socialism, via the glasnost or openness that was central to his policy of liberalization, it did not occur to him that no such truth existed. In 1988, he said: We are striving in the present conditions to revive the Leninist look of the new system, to rid it of accumulations and deformations, of everything that shackled society and prevented it from realizing the potential for Socialism in full measure.72 The metaphors used are here consistently those of extraneousness: the system exists encumbered by accumulations, the society exists hindered by shackles, and potential exists, unencumbered by decades of Soviet history, immaterially and Platonically better than the contemporary configuration. That Gorbachev spoke of perestroika restructuring in addition to glasnost shows that he had some inkling that this liberation had a constructive as well as destructive aspect; however, his focus on rendering these accumulations transparent and unmasking the hidden truth of socialism indicates that he saw his agenda as one of stripping-away rather than of replacement. In fact, replacement dominated the early years of glasnost. What was described in the West as a liberation of the press was in fact the top-down, authoritarian restaffing of all major media outlets by liberal sympathizers. The Soviet hierarchy was used against itself until it ceased to exist. Chief in this restructuring was Alexander Nikolayevich Yakovlev, the godfather of glasnost, a senior advisor to Gorbachev who had been the Soviet ambassador to Canada.73 A liberal who obscured his intentions during and after his promotion to the Politburo, he would remark in a 2003 interview, I myself am a sinner. *+ I spoke about the renewal of socialism but knew where it was all heading.74 Dedicated to the debunking of the neoreligion of Marxism,7576 Yakovlev ensured that liberals were put in charge of the state historical institute, the national sociological association, the economics branch of the academy

71 72

Yurchak, 77 http://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/19/world/gorbachev-urges-party-to-update-communisttheory.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm 73 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/19/international/europe/19yakovlev.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 74 Anatoly Kostyukov, Ya govoril pro obnovlenie sotsializma, a sam znal, k chemy delo idet, interview with Alexander Yakovlev, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, February 12, 2003 75 Yakovlev, Alexander. The Fate of Marxism in Russia. Trans. Fitzpatrick, Catherine A. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. 76 Yakovlevs allusion to the neoreligion of Marxism was not incidental. An introduction to his book, The Fate of Marxism in Russia, calls Marxism the equivalent of a state church and speaks of its need for a doctrine of the faith as a source of unity and authority. http://books.google.com/books?id=gpwP3w4U38UC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

of sciences, and various public opinion centers.77 Gorbachev, although his alliance with the Columbiaeducated Yakovlev was certainly conscious,78 did not seem at all aware that the bureaucratism he was combating was not separate from socialism itself, which he still fundamentally believed in.79 While many liberally-minded Soviets complained, correctly, that Gorbachevs restructuring was a bureaucratic process itself and did not constitute a change in structure, Yakovlev understood that the appointment of liberals would cause a gradual momentum of change which would eventually result in the end of socialism itself.80 In the media, he and those he appointed fostered a type of yellow journalism which appeared to take a healthy interest in rectifying social problems in the Soviet Union, but which instilled in the public mind the paradoxical but subversive ideas that either the capitalist states were superior to the Soviet Union in every way,81 or, more radically, that socialism and capitalism were essentially the same and that the USSR was already capitalist.82 Where Gorbachev had consistently spoken of a socialist pluralism, the sort of pluralism that ended up unfolding itself in Gorbachevs USSR had a distinctly, even dogmatically anti-socialist bent.83 Gorbachev had started to use the phrase socialist pluralism in 1987; in 1990 he admitted that what he was really espousing was full political pluralism.84 The correctness of Yurchaks thesis about Soviet totality can be seen reflected in the doggedly Leninist terminology in which Gorbachev and his advisors insisted on describing his agenda. His deputy Georgy Smirnov invented the slogan Not back to Lenin, but forward to Lenin!85 and even Yakovlev opined in 1989 that: Perestroika requires a revival of genuine Leninism. Only now do we realize the full dimensions of Stalins abandonment and distortion of Lenins ideas, principles and practices. *+ Democracy, civil peace and individual economic initiative were replaced by commands, repression and bureaucracy *.+ And though Lenin did not live long enough to work out all the conceptions of socialism that we need, we are returning to his basic perceptions. In this sense, Lenin is a living adviser in our analysis of present-day problems. (ibid)
77

Alexander Dallin, Soviet History, in Alexander Dallin and Bertrand M. Patenaude (eds.) Soviet Scholarship under Gorbachev (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). 78 Gorbachevs glasnost, search Columbia 79 Gorbachevs glasnost, search bureaucratism 80 Gorbachevs glasnost 81 Kotkin, 1991, p.53, 75.; Andrei P. Tsygankov, The Irony of Western Ideas in a Multicultural World: Russians Intellectual Engagement with the end of History and Clash of Civilizations, International Studies Review Vol.5 (2003), p.58-60. 82 Kotz and Weir, p.68.; Also see John E. Elliot, Disintegration of the Soviet Politico -Economic System, International Journal of Social Economics Vol.22, No.3 (1995), p.37.
83

http://books.google.com/books?id=6YxnWSrZJWsC&pg=PA328&lpg=PA328&dq=gorbachev+socialist+pluralism&s ource=bl&ots=s13YApQmuv&sig=dINHLikMUyIwHwT7hHvH4ORn84o&hl=en&sa=X&ei=hrUGUcbiJsaoywHy9oGQC w&ved=0CFoQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=gorbachev%20socialist%20pluralism&f=false 84 http://www.questia.com/read/1G1-166093626/gorbachev-lenin-and-the-break-with-leninism 85 http://books.google.com/books?id=j6VFdJON0kC&pg=PA96&lpg=PA96&dq=gorbachev+socialist+pluralism&source=bl&ots=Ecx06QDiPe&sig=lE54PHbTMsbSpk4 obj-1iJfjvxM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=hrUGUcbiJsaoywHy9oGQCw&ved=0CF0Q6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=lenin&f=false

In this speech, we can see the equation of Lenin with pure or ideal socialism and Stalin with superfluity and distortion which allowed Lenin, in the place of Western liberalism, to serve as an empty mediator and legitimizer of any scheme the Gorbachev administration should decide to implement. Certainly, as a revolutionary, Lenin had promoted rapid and transgressive social change, and even after the revolution he had spoken of the need to ruthlessly criticize the economy, as well as the bureaucracy and party machinery in the effort to eliminate the last traces of Tsarism (McNair 1989). However, the unstated assumption until then had been that, the revolution being over, the Soviet state was the legitimate heir to Lenin in a more or less sensible procession of causalities and that future decisions would take more or less the same course. The idea that some potential or ideal had been missed or overlooked was, then, both new, and subversive in the extreme. Of course, the idea was not really new exiled revolutionary Leon Trotsky had promoted the same ideas in his The revolution betrayed but its subversive potential had always been recognized by the bureaucracy and the work was, of course, suppressed. Institutionalized dissidence progressed until the Soviet media attacked the military, the Party and even Gorbachev himself, hiring moles to report on lack of efficiency in industry, among other areas. This type of prurient interest in Soviet social problems extended to the film industry, where glamorous films about prostitution inspired a majority of high school girls interviewed toward the end of the decade to covet this career path as market reforms annihilated full employment.86 Those who spoke out in favor of the old regime, like the chemist Nina Andreyeva, were silenced and condemned by State media organs. Andreyevas most famous opinion piece provides an interesting alternative picture of the glasnost era: We are Leningraders, and therefore we were particularly interested in watching recently the good documentary movie about Sergei Kirov. But at times the text that accompanied the film not only diverged from the movie's documentary evidence but even made it appear somewhat ambiguous. For example, the movie would show the outburst of keenness, joie de vivre, and spiritual enthusiasm of people building socialism, while the announcer's text would be about repression, about lack of information. *+ A furious argument was generated, for example, by a respected academician's recent assertion that present-day relations between states from the two different socioeconomic systems apparently lack any class content. I assume that the academician did not deem it necessary to explain why it was that, for several decades, he wrote exactly the opposite, namely, that peaceful coexistence is nothing but a form of class struggle in the international arena. It seems that the philosopher has now rejected this view. Never mind, people can change their minds. It does seem to me, however, that duty would nevertheless command a leading philosopher to explain - at least to those who have studied and are studying his books - what is happening today; does the international working class no longer oppose world capital as embodied in its state and political organs? *+

86

Elizabeth Waters, Restructuring the Woman Question: Perestroika and Prostitution, Feminist Review, No.33 (Autumn, 1989).

It seems to me that many of the present debates center on the same question: Which class or stratum of society is the leading and mobilizing force of perestroika? [Alexander] Prokhanov proceeds from the premise that the specific nature of the present state of social consciousness is typified by the presence of two ideological currents or, as he puts it, "alternative towers" which are trying, from different directions, to overcome the "socialism that has been built in battles'' in our country. Although he exaggerates the significance and acuteness of the duel between these two "towers," the writer is nevertheless correct in emphasizing that "they agree only on the slaughter of socialist values." But both of them, so their ideologists claim, are "for perestroika."87 Although the remains of the regime ensured that counter-dissidents like Andreyeva received some attention, they were soon dismissed almost as easily as their ideological opponents would have been a mere decade previously. Gorbachev repeatedly declaimed his less liberal opponents as class enemies, unable, as Yurchak shows, to formulate his liberalism except in terms of Party buzzwords.88 By 1989, the job was done: one high-ranking official was able to claim publicly that the government was illegitimate, having been brought into being through bloodshed and with the aid of mass murderers and crimes against humanity.89 The system had fallen apart. Gorbachev lost his job when the USSR ceased to exist in 1991. The shift in consciousness explained by Yurchak happened in the West, too, where the supposedly inevitable Soviet collapse was, as mentioned before, in fact predicted by very few, but incorporated after the fact into a hegemonic teleology which defines all aspects of contemporary political discourse. In 1992, only a year after the official collapse, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama published a work entitled The end of history and the last man. Positing against the Marxist conception of history - in which liberalism will eventually be superseded by an industrialized, but communitarian future - a liberal-democratic future which is hegemonic, unending and unquestionably superior, Fukuyamas work is emblematic of the post-Soviet zeitgeist. The dual role of Fukuyamas book is emphasized in the title: not only does Fukuyama intend to establish that there is no longer any outside when it comes to liberal democracy, he also intends to psychologize all societal configurations which might preclude it. In the preamble to The end of historyFukuyama writes: I [argue] that a remarkable consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a system of government had emerged throughout the world over the past few years, as it conquered rival ideologies like hereditary monarchy, fascism, and most recently communism. More than that, however, I [argue] that liberal democracy may constitute the "end point of mankind's ideological evolution" and the "final form of human government," and as such constituted the "end of history." That is, while earlier forms of government were characterized by grave defects and irrationalities that led to their eventual collapse, liberal democracy was
87 88

http://www.sadcom.com/pins/about/andreeva.htm Gorbachevs glasnost 89 Kevin OConnor, Intellectuals and Apparatchiks: Russian Nationalism and the Gorbachev Revolution (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006), p.99.; Robert V. Daniels,

arguably free from such fundamental internal contradictions*.+ While some present-day countries might fail to achieve stable liberal democracy, and others might lapse back into other, more primitive forms of rule like theocracy or military dictatorship, the ideal of liberal democracy could not be improved on. (Fukuyama 1992) Fukuyama then affirms his belief in the essentially inextricable nature of democracy and the free market, continuing that strong governments have been failing for the last two decades, while a liberal revolution in economic thinking has sometimes preceded, sometimes followed, the move toward political freedom around the globe (Fukuyama 1992). This last line is a reference to the liberal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, which ended in 1989 to widespread youth protest, eventually giving way to a more or less liberal democracy (Angel & Pollack, 1989).90 The seemingly spontaneous collapse of both governments constituted a heartwarming moment for anti-government centrists like Fukuyama: both the extreme left and the extreme right had thrown up their hands in defeat, acknowledging the supremacy of the small-S liberal state. The era of big-E golpes de Estado and big-R Russian Revolutions was over, and the citizens of the world could look forward to a relative lack of excitement in their political lives, now and per secula seculorum. This apparent boon of peace leads to Fukuyamas next point, that objections to liberal politics are the product of a brain that is pathologically addicted to violence and struggle. He writes: Following Nietzsche's line of thought, we are compelled to ask the following questions: Is not the man who is completely satisfied by nothing more than universal and equal recognition something less than a full human being, indeed, an object of contempt, a "last man" with neither striving nor aspiration? Is there not a side of the human personality that deliberately seeks out struggle, danger, risk, and daring, and will this side not remain unfulfilled by the "peace and prosperity" of contemporary liberal democracy? (Fukuyama 1992) In later chapters, extending this pathologization to the figure of the king or dictator himself, he frames this in terms of Greek , heart or spirit: It is clear that megalothymia is a highly problematic passion for political life, for if recognition of one's superiority by another person is satisfying, it stands to reason that recognition by all people will be more satisfying still. Thymos, which first came to light as a humble kind of selfrespect, can thus also manifest itself as the desire to dominate. This latter, dark side of thymos was of course present right from the outset in Hegel's description of the bloody battle, since the desire for recognition provoked the primordial battle and ultimately led to the domination by the master of the slave. The logic of recognition ultimately led to the desire to be universally recognized, that is, to imperialism. Thymos, either in the humble form of the greengrocer's sense of dignity, or in the form of megalothymiathe tyrannical ambition of a Caesar or a

90

The Chilean Elections of 1989 and the Politics of the Transition to Democracy Alan Angell and Benny

Pollack Bulletin of Latin American Research , Vol. 9, No. 1 (1990), pp. 1-23

Stalinhas been a central subject of Western political philosophy, even if the phenomenon has been given a different name by each thinker (Fukuyama 1992). The age of megalothymia, then, is over the individual desire for political excitement on the one hand or mass recognition on the other is clearly not enough to justify a violation of the eternal pax democratica established by the Soviet collapse. Fukuyama, and his dual agenda of framing every extraliberal ideology, especially if it has a material manifestation, as both moribund and pathological, represent a current of thought that is so hegemonic that even its critics often end up accepting its dubious precepts. The Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe, in this case writing against John Rawls, whose formulation of democratic consensus is more or less continuous with Fukuyamas, speaks of the end of history as a society from which politics has been eliminated,91 as it tends to erase the very place of the adversary, thereby expelling any legitimate opposition from the democratic public sphere.92 Against this erasure of adversarial politics, Mouffe proposes antagonism or agonism, a politics of struggle.93 Where Fukuyama is explicitly polemicizing against Nietzsche, upholding the complacent last man as the ideal liberal-democratic subject, Mouffe hopes that Nietzsches heroic agonism will, like the Chinese trickster hero Sun Wukong, cause enough havoc in heaven to keep things interesting. But it is Fukuyama who is right here keeping things interesting is not an adequate excuse for causing unease without occasion, and Mouffe, having accepted Fukuyamas terms, will lose the debate every time, a rebel without a cause. Instead of accepting that amorphous valuations of struggle or mass excitement are the only alternative to pax democratica, any sound critique of liberal democracy will formulate its issues in terms of unfulfilled promises and disguised violence, with the blissful postindustrial economies which communism, according to Fukuyama (1992, p. xv), was woefully inadequate at generating, limited to a small sector of the worlds population, unsurprisingly the descendants of the first colonial adventurers. Self-sufficiency, the literal translation of the much-derided juche philosophy which dominates the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, removes the third-world nation into a second-world interstice which lacks both the extreme poverty of its prior existence and the post-industrial decadence of its former exploiters. The usual vicious response of the international community to this act of removal raises further questions, but to focus on material issues of food extraction and distribution, their lack of resolution seen in the mass starvation which persists globally, seems more politically productive than any variation on struggle for its own sake. In this sense, when Fredric Jameson opposes third-world nationalism to American postmodernist culture,94 he is correct, and the claim of rival Marxist Aijaz Ahmad that Jameson constructs *a binary+ between a capitalist First World and a presumably pre- or non-capitalist Third World *that+ is empirically ungrounded in any facts (Ahmad 1994, p. 101) is entirely beside the point. One of E.M. Woods primary theses, that capitalism operates in three sequential stages, agrarian, industrial and financial (Wood 2002), provides us with a perfectly adequate index of what distinguishes capitalist First World countries from capitalist Third World ones: percentages of urbanization, industrial vs. service labor, and financial vs. industrial GDP demonstrate broad trends that cannot be dismissed with the simple fact of most countries shared capitalism. If these sequential stages were to lead, eventually, to post-industrial economies worldwide, it is hardly likely that anyone would fight the process, but the subject of alimentary production introduces a fatal monkey wrench into the cogs of liberalization, as it renders full urbanization impossible by definition. This full urbanization is the mutual assumption of both liberals like Fukuyama and Marxists like Luxemburg, who said that peasants naturally tended to the camp of reaction95 and
91 92

Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 29. Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 14. 93 http://www.redpepper.org.uk/hearts-minds-and-radical-democracy/ 94 http://postcolonial.net/@/DigitalLibrary/_entries/113/file-pdf.pdf 95 P. Frohlich; "Rosa Luxemburg: Her Life and Work"; London; 1940; p. 113

wrote of Leninist policy that the proclamation for immediate seizure and distribution of land by the peasants had necessarily to work in the very opposite direction to that intended. It is not only not a socialist measure, but it bars the way to such.96 To dismiss top-down land redistribution and a cohesive policy with regard to the peasants as mere megalothymia when full urbanization is a vanishing imaginary is irresponsible at best. Before proceeding, we must discuss one last event which, while central to Fukuyamas thesis, does not fit into his narrative. This is the protest at Tiananmen Square of 1989, a demonstration led by students who wanted to see Gorbachevs reformist policy adopted by the Chinese government. In fact, Hu Yaobang, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, had been prepared to follow Gorbachev both politically and economically, but his death and replacement by hardliners had preserved the countrys power structure more or less intact.97 Disappointed, a number of students took to the square, hoping that new general secretary Zhao Ziyang, premier Li Peng and senior leader Deng Xiaoping would sense the winds of change and continue in Hus footsteps. Wuer Kaixi, the Uyghur student leading the protest, eventually obtained a meeting with Li, but, overconfident, interrupted him immediately, and then bodily collapsed, out of fear or illness.98 This was the last straw, and martial law was declared, the protests put down. Some have seen the brief negotiations between students and government as the emergence of a civil society in China against the paternalistic, one-sided dominance of Marxism in China initiated by Mao Zedong, pointing to the widespread use of parental officials (fu mu guan, literally mother and father functionaries) as slang for bureaucrats and the patriarchal figure of Mao as signs that China needs to grow up.99 These authors often point to authors like Locke, Hegel and Tocqueville, who, unlike Hobbes and Paine, saw civil society as something partially or entirely separate from the state and from society, and represented a higher stage of maturity than mere submission to the big-S State.100 However, there is a strange and not entirely compelling reversal in this Western conception of adulthood, namely, that to grow up would involve the Chinese communist gerontocracy ceding most or all of its power to a protest body consisting mostly of high school and college students. This is especially odd in light of the high degree of technical specialization seen in Chinese government; almost all high-ranking Chinese government officials have an advanced engineering degree, something unheard of in the West (with the notable exception of Angela Merkel, who after all grew up in the German Democratic Republic).101 The citation of Locke and Tocqueville is unexpectedly appropriate, given the Franco-American revolutionary kitsch popular with the Tiananmen protestors, from the Goddess of Democracy sculpture created by students from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, which is nearly indistinguishable from the statue in New York Harbor,102 to students reading the US Declaration of Independence aloud to reporters.103 Gorbachev visited, albeit not explicitly in order to bless the protests, in early 1989; two months later he renounced the Brezhnev doctrine and student-led color revolutions swept Eastern Europe for the remainder of the year.104 The media focus on these student revolutions, which ignores the role of liberal functionaries, Western diplomats, and
96 97

R. Luxemburg: The Russian Revolution. Naughton, Barry. The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth. Cambridge, MA: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-262-14095-9. pp.99. 98 http://books.google.com/books?id=T-hxw0d05gC&pg=PA121&dq=li+peng+wu%27er+meeting&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ksfSUMTMJMmtqAHNoYGYDw&ved=0CDwQ6AEwAQ#v=o nepage&q=li%20peng%20wu%27er%20meeting&f=false essay before the one linked 99 Same source, essay linked 100 http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/un-dpadm/unpan041314.pdf 101 http://singularityhub.com/2011/05/17/eight-out-of-chinas-top-nine-government-officials-are-scientists/ 102 Tsao Tsing-yuan (1994). Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Elizabeth J. Perry. ed. Essay "The Birth of the Goddess of Democracy" from Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China. Boulder, Col.: Westview Press. pp. 1407. 103 http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0092_Tiananmen.html 104 Google books link

emissaries of the IMF in both perestroika and capitalist restructuring, provides us with a rosy picture of liberalization in which totalitarian hierarchy simply dissolved, leaving behind it no more and no less than ideal freedom. That the Tiananmen protests failed may be an accident of history, but, crucially, the intricate machinations behind the activist faade of the Soviet collapse provide us with an approximate picture of what would have occurred had Tiananmen succeeded. In any case, the continued dominance of the Chinese Communist Party is proof that Fukuyamas end of history has not yet occurred, nor is it necessarily inevitable. 105
105

On siege and dogma

In this discussion of Marxism and Christianity, the comparative omission of Orthodoxy and Maoist China in the historical discussion may be noted. The relegation of these two historical movements to the background of the project merits further discussion. In a word, Soviet communism and Catholic Christianity are doctrines of siege, while Maoism and Orthodoxy are not; however, the reasons for this distinction are as much due to prior decisions on the part of their leaders as they are to geography. The geographical factor is easy enough to explain: if we examine the Catholic Church during the Reformation, or the Soviet Union during the Khrushchev administration, we note that their close proximity to the Protestant or liberal West made self-criticism and a relative openness with respect to doctrine a virtual impossibility. As we have demonstrated, the Gorbachevist acceptance of self-criticism as a universal good immediately led to cracks in the USSRs totalitarian faade, interstices through which the Western powers, fully militarized, eventually burst, quickly assuming control and building up the apparatuses of liberal capitalism in the ashes of the regime. Likewise, critics of Catholic dogma like Jansen and Savonarola, by their own account intent only on restoring the purity of a corrupted but essentially correct religious product, were in fact instrumental in the secularization of the West. By contrast, the relative removal of the Maoist project from the liberal West meant that self-criticism could be pursued and even promoted without fear, and Maoism as an ideology took on an appearance much more open and fluid than that of the Soviet Union. In the same fashion, we see how Christian Orthodoxy neither produced Protestantism nor engaged with it; the various Catholic reactions to Protestantism, whether nominally for its values or against them, were never bothered with by the Orthodox leaders, who were never geographically nor ideologically threatened by Protestants. However, while this geographical explanation will prove valuable in discussing the viability of certain historical projects, it is in neither case the whole story. After the defeat of Germany, the chief mission of most of the Allied powers after World War II was to prevent the Soviet Union from expanding into Western Europe and Japan (Black, Cyril E.; English, Robert D.; Helmreich, Jonathan E.; McAdams, James A. (2000), Rebirth: A Political History of Europe since World War II, Westview Press, 60-71), something that the Soviet leadership realized too late, having chosen to play fair with their erstwhile allies; at the end of the war, the Soviet sphere of influence, so recently poised to dominate the continent, became relatively minor in Western Europe, where a number of strong liberal states were instead established (Black et al. 63-71) . After this division, the situation of the USSR as a nation under siege by the liberal West became ever more apparent, and the countrys policy grew increasingly defensive and ideologically entrenched as the Western powers expanded their ideological, cultural and economic reach around most of the rest of the world. The Soviet Union produced little mass culture and few institutions of counter-globalization; as a result, it was taken ever less seriously in international endeavors, internalizing its inferior status through the 70s and 80s as it began to produce pale socialist replicas of the artifacts of a spreading neoliberal world culture: blue jeans, aviator sunglasses, and discos (Parenti 49). Simultaneously, Maos China grew ever more radical, with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a campaign to restructure society along the lines of a radical peasant Marxism, lasting well into the late 70s; predictably, the chairmans identification of the Soviet Union with revisionism, an impure, corrupted versio n of Marxism, gained much popularity in Western intellectual circles (http://www.marxists.org/history/erol/uk.hightide/red-starmao.htm). Maos criticism of Khrushchev, which eventually led to a diplomatically toxic schism between the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China, was not unfounded. In fact, the new premier had introduced doubt into the Central Committee in a manner not unlike Gorbachevs, calling for newness, removing prominent Stalinists from power and decrying Stalins policy of demanding absolute submission to his opinion while denying his own role in the Stalinist administration (http://www.historyguide.org/europe/khrush_speech.html). Khrushchevs policy toward the West was also in the spirit of conciliation and peaceful coexistence with the West, as his backroom negotiations with Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis and establishment of detente demonstrate (The Rise and Fall of Dtente, Professor Branislav L. Slantchev, Department of Political Science, University of California San Diego 2009). Furthermore, the establishment of a black market under Khrushchev, although it was, as was mentioned, entirely subordinated to the whims of the Soivet government, weakened the Partys monopoly on truth and provided the human capital for the Harvard voucher policy described in earlier chapters. These actions may well have contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the Sino-Soviet split, more or less unilaterally initiated by the Maoist government, played its own role in events. The failure, previously described, of the Western church in affirming itself as mediator, instead relying on Protestant terminology in its elaboration of each new debate, has its parallel in the failure of the USSR to impose itself with authority instead of the institutions led by the UN and NATO as the arbiter of

international politics. As a result, both institutions developed internal structures and rituals that can only be understood as those of society in a state of siege under liberalism. These features are entirely absent in Maoism and Eastern Orthodoxy, which claimed much stronger cultural totalities over their respective populations. This is a fact that must be approached with a certain subtlety. Soviet communism, given the chance, did not conquer Europe, and Catholicism failed to maintain its role as societal mediatrix in the reason-faith dialectic that it established. Likewise, the black markets denounced by Mao and the lax morals decried by Savonarola may be traced back to a higher tolerance of doubt than was found in both Easts. Once the relationship of proximity and antagonism between liberalism and Western communism, or liberalism and Western Christianity, was firmly established, however, the question becomes much more complicated. Beginning with the communist case, we the case of Western Maoism. In China, Maoism was less an ideology than a series of policies implemented by the Chinese government, none of which led to state liberalization; in the West, however, Maoism assumed all of the characteristics of an ideology, its perceived excitement and hyperradicalism attracting European youth and persuading them to reject the Soviet government for its perceived stagnation, lack of selfcriticism and (somewhat ridiculously) supposed return to capitalism. An extremely coherent account of its political unfolding can be found in an interview with Alain Badiou entitled On different streams within French Maoism. The author describes the initial, carnivalesque scramble to produce revolution in the head, to launch bold attacks and stunts and to build prospects for a New Left outside of the revisionism of the PCF and the USSR. However, quite suddenly and in the mid-70s, the same activists who had thought that it was actually revolutionary, in an immediate sense, realized that it was not. They disappeared, practically overnight, or became assimilated into a transition from the alternatives of 'bourgeois world or revolutionary wo rld' to those of 'totalitarianism or democracy. Badiou concludes with the pronouncement that politics as excitement is not a good thing, telling the story of a Dionysian communist mayor who turned to extremist fascism in order to maintain his exciting political image. On the academic and theoretical level, European Maoism was perhaps most responsible for the propagation of the idea that left-leaning Western academics could equally criticize capitalism and revisionist Soviet communism, in the hopes of improving both; of course, no revolution against capitalism occurred, but by 1980 the Western left was (like China itself) so hopelessly alienated from Soviet reality that it broadly welcomed its collapse, a collapse in part encouraged by the influx of disembodied ideals of public self-criticism as a universal good (Badiou etc). It is with this history in mind that we consider early Catholic revisionism in establishing the faith-reason dialectic: to assert transcendent faith in Orthodox terms at any point subsequent to the publication of the work of Duns Scotus or of Ockham would merely have been to concede the primacy of sola fe to the early ancestors of Protestantism, and to further delegitimize the Church as the mediator of either faith or reason. The risk of asserting intra-schismatic critiques of one side of an illiberal schism, as demonstrated clearly in the SinoSoviet case, is that the apparently more orthodox side will gradually be tugged into the embrace of the liberal outside, as Nixons visit to China and the subsequent US-Chinese alliance against Soviet-aligned Vietnam demonstrates (http://tieba.baidu.com/p/76314345). Transcendent faith in Christian Orthodoxy only exists as mediated by a strict adherence to Church tradition, analogous to the role of Stalinism under Mao. Western Maoists, who were self-described revolutionaries belonging to no established socialist state and therefore unable to participate in Party tradition, co-opted the language of the Sino-Soviet split and transferred it to an academic plane materially alienated from any communist project, accelerating the decline of the global left whose vanguard they claimed to represent. In like manner, now that Ockhams methodological individualism has become hegemonic, the mere Catholic reassertion of the primacy of the esse would only accelerate the discarding of the Church by advocates of sola fe.

IV Synthesis The parallel historical evaluations of Christianity and Marxism, however cursory, having been completed, we may now examine a number of efforts at synthesis of the two traditions, all more or less contemporary. Three distinct strains of Christian-Marxist synthesis may be here identified, in the order in which they will be examined: the theological, the theoretical, and the historical. The first, theological strain refers more or less exclusively to the movement of liberation theology, current in the 1980s: a left-wing Catholicism concerned with the question of the poor, it has enjoyed limited material results in the Latin American continent in which it originated. The works of Gustavo Gutierrez, a Peruvian Dominican considered to be the movements founder, and of Jon Sobrino, a Spanish Jesuit active in the movement, will be examined and critiqued. The second, theoretical strain, associated with the radical traditionalism of Alasdair Macintyre and of the University of Nottingham under John Milbank, will be understood chiefly through the latters dialogic work with the post-Marxist Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek. The third, historical strain, born out of necessity in the German Democratic Republic, will be traced and explicated as a concrete and synthetic manifestation of Christian and Marxist theory under a condition of siege by liberalism. These strains represent three aspects of a cohesive theoretical and practical answer to postmodern liberalism, and they will be judged on their material practicability in a post-Soviet, post-Vatican II world. Liberation Theology As a Latin American, Gutierrez was the son of a region with a complex past, the Spanish conquest having given way, seemingly seamlessly, to the economic domination of the Northern continent. The movement of liberation theology that he initiated was therefore directed at bringing about a liberatory change in consciousness at the mass level, from the most oppressed sectors of society upwards, that would reject in Christian terms imperialism and other forms of subjugation. In A Theology of Liberation, in a section entitled Pobreza: Solidaridad y protesta, he writes: El hombre, creado a imagen y semejanza de Dios, est destinado a dominar la tierra. El hombre no se realiza sino transformando la naturaleza y entrando, consecuentemente, en relacin con otros hombres; slo as el hombre llega a una plena conciencia de s mismo, como libertad creadora que se conquista ella misma en el trabajo. La situacin de explotacin e injusticia que implica la pobreza, hace del trabajo algo servil y deshumanizante. El trabajo alienado, en vez de liberar, esclaviza an ms al hombre. (375) Consciousness, specifically self-consciousness, as in Marxism, is here posited as the ultimate remedy for capitalism: as the bourgeoisie attained self-consciousness and rebelled against the unsuspecting aristocracy, so can the proletariat attain self-consciousness and finally overthrow the bourgeoisie. However, the alienated labor begot of this bourgeois revolution is described as a process of violent subordination and forced servitude, a regression. A Marxist focus on the question of factory labor is in this sense necessary to the projects postliberalism or metaliberalism as opposed to the mere liberalism that a project espousing mere self-consciousness would entail. Qualifying this metaliberalism, and adding that dependencia y liberacin son trminos correlativos, Gutierrez seeks a liberation that is collective and not individual, a society of solidarity without exploitation. On the analogy of the Greek polis, he writes:

La razn humana se ha hecho razn poltica. Para la conciencia histrica contempornea, lo poltico no es ya ms algo que se atiende en los momentos libres que deja la vida privada y ni siquiera una regin bien delimitada de la existencia humana. La construccin desde sus bases econmicas de la polis, de una sociedad en la que los hombres pueden vivir solidariamente como tales es una dimensin que abarca y condiciona severamente todo el quehacer del hombre. (76) If bourgeois freedom is individual in nature, the freedom of the poor espoused by Gutierrez is collective and fraternal. This is certainly a noble goal, and one with few contradictions with Christianity or Marxism, but the genealogy that he provides of this solidary society is flawed at best, as can already be seen in his statement that human reason has become political reason. First of all, Gutierrez wishes to decentralize the Church, a goal that must be treated with extreme skepticism under postmodernity. He writes: La iglesia de Amrica latina ha vivido y sigue viviendo, en gran parte, en estado de gueto. Surgida en la poca de la Contrarreforma, la comunidad cristiana latinoamericana ha estado marcada por una actitud de defensa de la fe. Esta postura fue reforzada, en algunos casos, por la hostilidad de las corrientes liberales y anticlericales del siglo pasado y, ms recientemente, por las duras crticas que recibe de quienes luchan por transformar la sociedad actual, a la cual la iglesia se halla estrechamente ligada. Esto llev a la iglesia a buscar el apoyo del poder establecido y de los grupos econmicamente poderosos, para hacer frente a sus adversarios eventuales y asegurar lo que crea ser una tranquila predicacin del evangelio. (134) Against this ecclesiastical corruption, brought on, admittedly, by the state of siege brought on by the Reformation, Gutierrez proposes a less church-oriented Christianity: La edad media con una iglesia coextensiva al mundo conocido en esa poca y fuertemente compenetrada con l, tendr una experiencia vital y finalmente segura y tranquila del fuera de la iglesia no hay salvacin. El estar por o contra Cristo es plenamente identificado con el estar por o contra la iglesia. *+ Esta situacin de la iglesia empieza a cambiar en la poca moderna, por la ruptura interna de la cristiandad y por el descubrimiento de nuevos pueblos. Pero en un primer momento la perspectiva eclesiocntrica persiste, salvo algn que otro retoque. En materia de libertad religiosa, que hemos tomado como punto de aplicacin de ese enfoque, ser el tiempo de la tolerancia religiosa: lo que Toms de Aquino consideraba vlido para los judos, ser extendido a los descendientes de los cristianos que se separaron culpablemente de la iglesia. La tolerancia religiosa dar lugar, en el siglo xix, al subproducto de la teora de la tesis y la hiptesis, que busca responder al movimiento de ideas nacidas en la Revolucin francesa, haciendo dar un paso ms al esquema de la tolerancia. (328-9) After a brief discussion of the mediating role of the Sacrament, Gutierrez continues: La iglesia slo se comprende en funcin de la realidad que ella misma anuncia a los hombres. Su existencia no es un <<para s>>, sino un <<para los otros>>. Su centro est fuera de ella: en la obra de Cristo y de su Espritu. Por el Espritu ella es constituida como sacramento universal de salvacin. *+ La mediacin de la conciencia del <<otro>>, del mundo en el que se da esa presencia, es la condicin indispensable de su propia conciencia como comunidad-signo. Todo intento por evitar esta mediacin slo puede llevar a la iglesia a una falsa percepcin de s misma: una conciencia eclesiocntrica. (334)

It must be emphasized here that Gutierrezs historical vision is essentially the same as the one presented in earlier chapters: the Church, and its sacraments, being and having been mediators of social life on a grand scale, the very totality of their power defined by this mediation. However, it seems that what Gutierrez is attempting is a type of deconstruction of this role in the service of a dubious dichotomy whose material ends are difficult to ascertain. The modernity that Gutierrez at least partially accepts severely degraded this function of mediation for the Catholic Church, a decline initiated by the Protestant focus on extra-ecclesiastical salvation. The self-consciousness of extra-ecclesiastical matters and the heightened focus on tolerance proposed by Gutierrez are, whether he likes it or not, a concession to the Protestant tradition, and a possible inroad for a further loss of church power. Furthermore, to unilaterally criticize the Church for its compromise with the established powers is to group all political power together without question, as Gutierrez does even more forcefully when he invokes the revolutionary anti-political potential of Jesus Christ: Jess muere en manos del poder poltico, opresor del pueblo judo. Sobre la cruz el ttulo segn la costumbre romana indicaba la razn de la condena; en el caso de Jess ese ttulo indica una culpabilidad de tipo poltico: rey de los judo. *+ Jess fue ejecutado por los romanos como jefe zelote; y [se] encuentra una prueba adicional de esta afirmacin en el episodio de Barrabs que fue, sin lugar a dudas, un zelote. (303) In this quote, Gutierrezs lack of subtlety with respect to political power reaches a point of danger. The arrival of early postmodernism in the 1960s, and the shift in the West from traditional Marxism to a post-Marxist current that emphasized power and hegemony over economic relations of exploitation, led to a corruption of Marxist terms in the service of a political project ultimately in the service of capitalism. The traces of this shift can be found in the work of Gutierrez, who does not distinguish between political and economic power, and this time appears not to distinguish between the power exercised during the Spanish conquest, for example, and the alienated economic exploitation imposed by North American imperialism. The difference between economic power and political power is a fundamental one: economic power as it exists is a relatively recent invention of capitalism, while political power has always existed in one form or another. The transition between the two in Latin America, it is true, was relatively seamless, with European economic pressures on Spain leading to a disastrous attempt at making feudalism keep up with capitalism and, with the arrival of bourgeois revolution, eventually giving way to capitalism itself. In Gutierrezs case, the danger in discarding classical Marxist terminology is his implicit recommendation that the Church attempt a state of absolutely pure and apolitical revolutionary fervor, sooner disappearing than allying itself with any political power at all. This position is materially untenable. To stress consciousness over politics, and Church self-awareness of its own mediating role over the Church itself, is to advocate an idealism easily cooptable into the postmodern project. Were he only against capitalism, many more material options would present themselves, some traditionalist, some Marxist; but Gutierrez rejects both in the name of pure consciousness, a decision anti-materialist in the extreme. As Gutierrez himself says of Marxist materialism, *+ en particular en la primera tesis, Marx se sita en forma equidistante tanto del materialismo antiguo como del idealismo, o para decirlo en trminos ms exactos, presenta su posicin como la superacin dialctica de ambos. (57) This is, in fact, one of the primary convergences between Marxism and Christianity: Marxist materialism establishes a dialectic between the material and the ideal precisely analogous to the one established by the pre-Reformation Catholic Church. Gutierrez supports this notion:

La cristiandad no es en primer lugar un concepto. Es, ante todo, un hecho. Se trata de la experiencia histrica ms larga de la iglesia. De ah que haya dejado una huella tan profunda en su vida y en su reflexin. (82) Unfortunately, Gutierrezs preoccupation with the supposed ecclesiocentrism of modern Christianity does not offer an adequate response to liberal idealism. The materialist option, in Gutierrezs own terms the option that would reestablish the traditional dialectic between material and ideal, would be to affirm this ecclesiocentrism, to reject the bourgeois notion that self-consciousness is in itself liberatory, and to seek means of fortifying the role of the concrete Church as a political and governmental mediator of social life. The church once was the polis that Gutierrez was seeking. It was not the only such polis, but its downfall to private consciousness represented a step away from, not towards, human solidarity. Without a full acknowledgement of this fact, the thesis of Gutierrez is already lost to Protestantism and postmodernity. Jon Sobrino, like Gutierrez, begins his Cristologa desde Amrica Latina with the proposal to go deeper than ecclesiology itself (1). Our new Christology, he writes, must give history of the fleshand-blood Jesus its full weight as revelation (11). This is already an ambiguous project, a possible manifestation of the sola scriptura used to liberal ends during the Reformation, analogous to the Gorbachev administrations use of the living Lenin as an empty signifier of bourgeois revolutionary ends. Sobrino, it seems, wishes also to effect a change in consciousness on the part of the Christian or postChristian subject, and to reestablish a community of belief in a revolutionary Jesus: To speak of Jesus as spirit rather than as law, then, is to say that the most profound reality of the historical Jesus is his ability to open up a wholly new history through his followers. *+ So long as domination and protest have not been overcome completely, so long as sinfulness and conflict perdure in history, Jesus will ever remain present as a dangerous memory and a point of crisis. He will remain to call our own path into question on the basis of his own historical path. (138) This reading of Jesus as revolutionary is not inaccurate; in fact, the spoken word of Christ as recorded in the bible is directed against materialism (in the popular sense) and religious hypocrisy and preaches a revolutionary new gospel of brotherly love. The properly Marxist question here, however, is what will be done with this gospel in the present day. In other words will this gospel of revolution be subordinated to prior centuries of ecclesiastical tradition and mediation, or will it prove itself to be another face of bourgeois sola scriptura disguised as fraternal Christian solidarity? The following quotes provide some clarity as to this question: With the edict of Theodosius in 380, Christianity went from being a cult religion to being the official state religion. The edict does talk about the Christian religion as one based on the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; but it is clear that the functions envisioned for it are those of any other state religion. Acceptance of it now becomes obligatory, and those who do not practice it are to be punished not only by God but also by the emperor. Thus Christianity was turned into a religion structurally, completing the process that had been going on for some time. The norm of truth in Christianity is no longer faith in the scandalous reality of the crucified Jesus but its usefulness to the state. *+ The point here is that this development certainly did take place, and right down to our own day we can see how political power has been a temptation for Christian faith. (296)

I would formulate my thesis in these modest terms: to the extent that Christians tend to overlook or forget the historical Jesus, they tend to structure Christian life more and more as a religion in the pejorative sense. (305) Once again, as in the work of Gutierrez, we see a broad distrust of political power and even of organized religion; what was intended as a work of left-wing Christianity appears more and more like a liberal Christianity verging on Protestantism. This distrust goes even further in the following quote: The crucified God, the powerless God on the cross of Jesus, draws the dividing line between Christian faith and every other type of religion. Christian faith lies beyond conventional theism and conventional atheism. But it is quite obvious that it has not been easy for Christians to maintain the scandal of the cross. *+ The repeatable nature of the Mass as a sacrifice has posed a great danger to the cross. There has been a real danger that the Mass might reduce the real, historical cross of Jesus to nothing more than a cultic, ritualized cross. (371-372) While a leftist Christianity must certainly be concerned with questions of fraternity and equality, and the revolutionary love of Jesus must equally take priority to pre-Christian Jewish tradition in such a schema, Sobrino in every case strays out of leftist and into liberal terms with the dichotomies that he establishes. To draw a contrast between political power and the historical Jesus, or between Christianity in its true form and religion in the pejorative sense is to accept a distinction between Christ and Christianity precisely analogous to the Protestant dichotomy that ended hegemonic Church mediation during the Reformation. Questioning the Mass itself, as Sobrino does, implies a rejection of Christianity in its material form that ignores the other functions of the Church as a collectivity, including the economic one. Little mention is made of capitalism, and none at all is made of the Catholic prohibition on usury that preceded it. Protestantism, with its rejection of this prohibition, was a major contributor to the inception of capitalist social relations. As Max Weber writes in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Even the Spaniards knew that heresy (i.e. the Calvinism of the Dutch) promoted trade, and this coincides with the opinions which Sir William Petty expressed in his discussion of the reasons for the capitalistic development of the Netherlands. Gothein rightly calls the Calvinistic diaspora the seed-bed of capitalistic economy. (10) The critique of the economic aspect of this historical process is central to leftist methodology, so it is surprising that Sobrino fails to mention it, instead focusing on the same amorphous conceptions of political power as Gutierrez. Even more surprisingly, Sobrino also evades discussion of the sociocultural aspect of the change: It is not the first stage of the Enlightenment that seems to pose the real challenge today. It is not such movements as liberalism, freemasonry and theosophy that raise questions of Latin American theology today. It is the whole problem of reality and concrete life itself, of the second stage of the Enlightenment, that now holds center stage. (34) The claim that liberalism has become irrelevant to any theology is extremely difficult to support. It is only with the acceptance of the idea that history has ended at the advent of postmodernism that such a claim makes any theoretical sense, and, even then, any serious advocacy of theology becomes extremely difficult. If Sobrino makes no effort to reject either liberalism or capitalism, nor to propose possible strategies for routing them, then the brand of liberation theology he advocates is very weak indeed. A

much more nuanced conception of the cultural, political and economic history of the West is necessary to any call for a revolutionary Christianity, and in this aspect the work of Sobrino is clearly deficient.

MacIntyre and Milbank A more persuasive historical account may be found in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, in particular his After Virtue; without explicitly rejecting Marxism, the author gives an account much like that of Gregory of the breakdown of Western moral totality and the rise of liberalism. Identifying Western thought since the Enlightenment as a series of attempts at creating a universal and secular moral code based on reason alone, MacIntyre claims that these codes really represent nothing more than promotions of base individual desire only held in check by successively smaller arrays of earlier taboos assumed to be universal. These codes replace one another as liberalism progresses, and in each era a certain set of taboos can be identified as normative; everything else is said to be left to the individual. Of David Hume, for example, he writes: Both in his History and in the Enquiry the passions of 'enthusiasts' and more particularly of the seventeenth-century Levellers on the one hand and of Catholic asceticism on the other are treated as deviant, absurd and in the case of the Levellers criminal. The normal passions are those of a complacent heir of the revolution of 1688. (214) In MacIntyres account, hundreds of such codes exist, each one a snapshot of the particular stage of liberalism in which it originates, despite a liberal abstraction of these writers from the cultural and social milieus in which they lived and thought *.+ The history of their thought acquires a false independence from the rest of the culture. Kant ceases to be part of the history of Prussia, Hume is no longer a Scotsman (11). More generally, this tension between secular individualism and earlier taboos is unsustainable, leading to the advancement of liberalism as individualist methodology is gradually applied to more and more of the moral schema. This also, to a certain extent, sheds light on the seemingly contradictory transitions from Protestant moral rigor to secular individualism described by Gregory. MacIntyre explains: How could it come about that 'being immoral' could be equated even as a special idiom with 'being sexually lax'? The answer to this question must be delayed, for the history of the word 'moral' cannot be told adequately apart from an account of the at-tempts to provide a rational justification for morality in that historical period from say 1630 to 1850when it acquired a sense at once general and specific. In that period 'morality' became the name for that particular sphere in which rules of conduct which are neither theological nor legal nor aesthetic are allowed a cultural space of their own. *+ In the persona of the philosophe the view which [Diderot] propounds is that if in modern France we all pursue our desires with an enlightened eye to the long-run we shall see that the conservative moral rules are by and large the rules which the appeal to their basis in desire and passion will vindicate. To this the younger Rameau has three replies. First, why should we have any regard for the long-run if the prospect of immediacy is sufficiently enticing? Secondly, does the philosophe's view not entail that even in the long-run we ought to obey the moral rules only when and insofar as they serve our desires? And thirdly is not this indeed the way of the world, that each individual, each class, consults his or its desires and to satisfy them preys on each

other? Where the philosophe sees principle, the family, a well-ordered natural and social world, Rameau sees these as sophisticated disguises for self-love, seduction and predatory enterprise. The challenge that Rameau presents to the philosophe cannot of course be met within the terms of Diderot's own thought. For what divides them is the question of precisely which of our desires are to be acknowledged as legitimate guides to action, and which on the other hand are to be inhibited, frustrated or re-educated; and clearly this question cannot be answered by trying to use our desires themselves as some sort of criterion. (46) After the breakdown of medieval totality, it is entirely natural for this progression to occur: Diderot has no justification for his promotion of these conservative moral rules and therefore cannot defend himself against Rameau, who represents a more evolved liberalism. Rameau, in turn, has been replaced by Kant, and Kant by Rawls, and so the process continues, with fewer and fewer older taboos remaining to be subjected to individualist critique. Furthermore, MacIntyre correctly identifies modern conservatism (in the popular sense) as containing as few of these traditionalist taboos as modern liberalism: This critique of liberalism should not be interpreted as a sign of any sympathy on my part for contemporary conservatism. That conservatism is in too many ways a mirror image of the liberalism that it professedly opposes. *+ The individualism of modernity could of course find no use for the notion of tradition within its own conceptual scheme except as an adversary notion; it therefore all too willingly abandoned it to the Burkeans, who, faithful to Burke's own allegiance, tried to combine adherence in politics to a conception of tradition which would vindicate the oligarchical revolution of property of 1688 and adherence in economics to the doctrine and institutions of the free market. (206) Against this state of affairs, MacIntyre proposes a kind of conservative (in the literal sense) Marxism, a theoretical synthesis between the relations described in Chapters I and III of this project. Like Marx and his successors, he rejects the immanence of the self and situates the quality of the individual in the social relations that surround him: In many premodern, traditional societies it is through his or her membership in a variety of social groups that the individual identifies himself or herself and is identified by others. I am brother, cousin and grandson, member of this household, that village, this tribe. These are not characteristics that belong to human beings accidentally, to be stripped away in order to discover 'the real me'. They are part of my substance, defining partially at least and sometimes wholly my obligations and my duties. Individuals inherit a particular space within an interlocking set of social relationships; lacking that space, they are nobody, or at best a stranger or an outcast. To know oneself as such a social person is however not to occupy a static and fixed position. It is to find oneself placed at a certain point on a journey with set goals; to move through life is to make progressor to fail to make progress toward a given end. (32) It is more difficult to isolate the differences between Marxs radical liberalism and MacIntyres radical conservatism than it may at first appear. In the Marxist project, the communality of precapitalist subjectivity is acknowledged, but is subordinated to a teleology in which a radical liberalism grounded in this social materialism will restore communal relations in an industrial context. As demonstrated in previous chapters, the Marxist states to a certain extent realized and even continue to realize this prophecy, though the transformation they enacted was neither global nor postcapitalist. To reject this

teleology entirely would therefore be unproductive. Furthermore, it must be emphasized that MacIntyre also seeks a communal postliberalism through the radical critique of capitalist and liberal relations. The difference between MacIntyre and Marx, if it exists, must therefore first be located in the question of subjectivity: Marx sought the restoration of communality through and after the universalization of the Enlightenment self, while MacIntyre seeks to reject this subjectivity entirely. Even so, this difference too may be illusory, as neither author has, or can have, a coherent account of the transition from liberal to communal subjectivity (though both have one of the past shift from communal to liberal consciousness). However, the material and social implications of the two subjectivities are distinct: a universalization of Enlightenment consciousness implies full urbanization and the completed division of the world population into bourgeoisie and proletariat, while a rejection of Enlightenment consciousness implies the preservation of the peasantry or the construction of a working class in the Soviet mode localized and bound to their immediate means of production. In this sense, MacIntyre is more Leninist than the early Marx. This is confirmed in his brief delineation of the moral counterproject: Part of the answer is: by generating just the right kinds of tension or even conflict, creative rather than destructive, on the whole and in the long run, between secular and sacred, local and national, Latin and vernacular, rural and urban. It is in the context of such conflicts that moral education goes on and that the virtues come to be valued and redefined. (160) Although MacIntyre is apparently describing the Middle Ages, the described mediation of most of these dialectics by a collective governing body is also applicable to the socialist state, as explained in earlier chapters of this project. This leads to the only methodological inconsistency in After Virtue, MacIntyres rejection of the socialist state as an embodiment of illiberal morality. The barbarous despotism of the collective Tsardom which reigns in Moscow, he writes, can be taken to be as irrelevant to the question of the moral substance of Marxism as the life of the Borgia pope was to that of the moral substance of Christianity (243). In MacIntyres own, illiberal terms, this is less of an indictment than it first appears; after all, neither the old Tsardom nor the papacy of Alexander VI had any hand in the rise of liberalism. In any case, it must be accepted that the social forms produced by the radical critique of liberalism are likely to converge on the model seen in Chapters I and III, the structure shared by medieval and Soviet society, and are therefore unlikely to appear as anything more than barbarous despotism to the civilized liberal observer. Tyranny must not be embraced, but it must be rejected as a category altogether. For this reason, MacIntyres concluding embrace of Trotskys premises *+ that the Soviet Union was not socialist and that the theory which was to have illuminated the path to human liberation had in fact led into darkness (244) accepts the very categories of light and darkness set by the Enlightenment that he set out to criticize. A methodologically consistent critique of liberalism must be more ecumenical and more adequately grounded in present material reality. Milbank / Zizek We turn now to the debate between the post-Marxist Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek and the theologian John Milbank. Zizek, despite his frequent left-statist critiques of postmodernism, is a popular figure in postmodernist circles, while Milbank dabbles in conservative politics in his native United Kingdom. The dialogue, a partial attempt at constructing a socialist and Christian critique of postmodernity, brings out fewer disagreements between the two intellectuals than might be expected. Zizek, in fact, begins with a reference to G. K. Chestertons novel The Man Who Was Thursday, which tells the story of Gabriel Syme, a young Englishman who makes the archetypal Chestertonian discovery of how order is the greatest miracle and orthodoxy the greatest of all rebellions. Paraphrasing a secondary motif of the book, Zizek describes the conservative critique of deconstructionist philosophy:

As cultural conservatives would put it today, deconstructionist philosophers are much more dangerous than actual terrorists: while the latter want to undermine our politico- ethical order to impose their own religious- ethical order, deconstructionists want to undermine order as such. (53) Wishing to take this critique a step further, Zizek continues: What Chesterton fails to perceive is that the universalized crime that he projects into lawless modern philosophy and its political equivalent, the anarchist movement that aims at destroying the totality of civilized life, is already realized in the guise of the existing rule of law, so that the antagonism between Law and crime reveals itself to be inherent to crime, the antagonism between universal and particular crime. (54) Although, as claimed in prior chapters, this process is not complete and is in fact unfinishable, Zizeks claim is nearly equivalent to MacIntyres simultaneous rejection of liberalism and conservatism on the grounds that both are liberal. While the latter part of the statement is undeniable, in both cases there is a real danger that this descriptive claim will lead to the Nietzschean or Mouffean call for a further breakdown of the social order with nothing to replace it. MacIntyre calls for a moral totality of some kind After Virtue is a secular work grounded in Aristotle, but the author himself is a Roman Catholic while Marxs defense of communal relations was at least partially successful in producing a moral totality of its own. What Zizek wants is more difficult to discern. Turning to an analysis of Christianity, Zizek reiterates the illiberal narrative, previously explicated in this work, of the establishment and the breakdown of the material-spiritual dialectic mediated by the Catholic Church: The starting pointof this entire movement is the medieval Catholic thought of someone like Thomas Aquinas, for whom philosophy should be a handmaiden of faith: faith and knowledge, theology and philosophy, supplement each other as a harmonious, nonconflictual, distinction within (under the predominance of) theology. Although God in himself remains an unfathomable mystery for our limited cognitive capacities, reason can also guide us toward him by enabling us to recognize the traces of God in created realitythis is the premise of Aquinass five versions of the proof of God (the rational observation of material reality as a texture of causes and effects leads us to the necessary insight into how there must be a primal Cause to it all; etc.). With Protestantism, this unity breaks apart: we have on the one side the godless universe, the proper object of our reason, and the unfathomable divine Beyond separated by a hiatus from it. Confronted with this break, we can do two things: either we deny any meaning to an otherworldly Beyond, dismissing it as a superstitious illusion, or we remain religious and exempt our faith from the domain of reason, conceiving it as an act of, precisely, pure faith (authentic inner feeling, etc.). *+ Both poles are thus debased: Reason becomes mere intellect, a tool for manipulating empirical objects, a mere pragmatic instrument of the human animal, and religion becomes an impotent inner feeling which can never be fully actualized, since the moment one tries to transpose it into external reality, one regresses to Catholic idolatry which fetishizes contingent natural objects. *+ The Protestant insistence on faith alone, on how the true temples and altars to God should be built in the heart of the individual, not in external reality, is an indication of how the anti-

religious Enlightenment attitude cannot resolve its own problem, the problem of subjectivity gripped by absolute solitude. *+ What this means is that, in spite of all its grounding power, Spirit is a virtual entity in the sense that its status is that of a subjective presupposition: it exists only insofar as subjects act as if it exists. Its status is similar to that of an ideological cause like Communism or Nation: it is the substance of the individuals who recognize themselves in it, the ground of their entire existence, the point of reference which provide the ultimate horizon of meaning to their lives, something for which these individuals are ready to give their lives; yet the only thing that really exists are these individuals and their activity, so this substance is actual only insofar as individuals believe in it. (57-69) This account, consistent with that of Gregory, demands a radical and totalitarian solution to these false dichotomies and broken ontologies. Zizeks answer, at least in this piece, is akin to that of the liberation theologians. Sobrino, we recall, asserted that Christian faith lies beyond conventional theism and conventional atheism, a claim that Zizek embraces. He elaborates: Insofar as religions remain religions, there is no ecumenical peace between themsuch a peace can develop only through their atheist doubles. Christianity, however, is an exception here: it enacts the reflexive reversal of atheist doubt into God himself. In his Father, why have you forsaken me?, Christ himself commits what is for a Christian the ultimate sin: he wavers in his Faith. While, in all other religions, there are people who do not believe in God, only in Christianity does God not believe in himself. *+ This is the way Christ brings freedom: confronting him, we become aware of our own freedom. (91) Zizek ends by embracing this atheist aspect of Christianity, claiming that the affinity between monotheism and atheism demonstrates *+ that monotheism itself prefigures atheism (105). Seeking to reestablish a community of belief beyond this inevitable breakdown of monotheism, Zizek continues: What if, in a kind of negation of negation, true atheism were to return to belief (faith?), asserting it without reference to Godonly atheists can truly believe; the only true belief is belief without any support in the authority of some presupposed figure of the big Other. (110) By setting aside the role of the mediator in favor of this amorphous ontological prospect, Zizek establishes his work as the foundation of a Marxist sola scriptura only defensible in the context of the Yugoslav socialist state in which he grew up. With the Titoist state as mediator, the Communism or Nation previously mentioned by Zizek served as the telos for a community of belief not too distinct from a preliberal religious one; however, with this mediator destroyed, the radical atheism proposed by Zizek is materially indistinguishable from its liberal version. The communitarian rhetoric of Karl Marx, not his brief lines on religion, established the common belief that allowed Yugoslavia to function as an organic whole. To claim Marxist atheism as central is insufficient grounding for a project that proposes to reverse the radical atheism of the Enlightenment itself; the lack of a common moral end (even as modest as the idea of communism) is what places Zizek on the side of Mouffe and not Marx or MacIntyre. Christs liberatory potential only makes sense as a project if we establish that what we are to be liberated from is neither Christ himself nor one another: as Zizek himself says, What we have after crucifixion, namely, the resurrected God, is neither God the Father nor God the Sonit is the Holy Ghost. And, as the Scriptures say, the Holy Ghost is love between

believersit is the spirit of the community of believers. These famous words of Christ: whenever two or three are gathered together *in love+ I am in the midst of you (27). This passage, not the supposed atheism of the crucifixion, provides an adequate base for a Christian social materialism that does not and cannot reject ecclesiocentrism. To be in favor of revolution qua revolution, or deconstruction qua deconstruction, is an essentially liberal position; only when the revolution is grounded in some collectively imagined moral or ethical end is it justifiable in radically leftist or radically conservative terms. Furthermore, in order for this end to be sustained there must be consolidated mediation by a collective and broadly meritocratic governing body with externally identifiable norms and taboos, an aspect of the question ignored by Zizek. Thus Zizek, like the liberation theologians and the deconstructionist philosophers he mentions, ends up advocating a kind of ideal freedom in inadequately defined terms, and ventures too far into the logic of creative destruction by destroying without creating. Milbanks response addresses several of these issues. Correctly, he identifies Zizeks liberal tendencies in his endorsement of Christian atheism: But here one can point out an interesting symptom in ieks writings. Basically, he endorses a Whiggish, Protestant metanarrative. Christianity gradually, if dialectically, posits its own covertly presupposed radicalism. Protestantism negates the Catholic negation of (Eastern) Orthodoxy, Hegel is the fully fledged Protestant consummation of Christian metaphysical logic. (121) If Zizek is wrong, however, which he certainly is to some extent, what does Milbank propose to remedy his error? Milbank begins by repeating the narrative of E. M. Wood (and of the American Marxist Robert Brenner), in which the rise of liberal capitalism was more or less exclusively predicated on the destruction of the English peasantry, with the supplementary thesis that capitalism in England was massively encouraged and driven forward by the justification granted to it by Calvinist theology, and by the association in the minds of the English gentry between their Protestant religion and their landed fortune (137). This is an important corollary to the narratives furnished by Zizek, Gregory and MacIntyre, and has already been discussed extensively. It does not, however, provide a counterproject to liberalism. What Milbank proposes in its place is a kind of Catholic sexuality predicated on reproduction and parenthood. Calling for an account of love which combines reciprocity with generosity, or the erotic with the ecstatic, within the terms of a Catholic metaphysics of participation as expounded by Augustine or Aquinas, Milbank adds: Would it not be more plausible to suppose that one needs to modify paternalism with a greater humility and attentiveness to populist feedback rather than to remove it altogether? Especially as it is clear that, since we are always educated animals (even in order to become language users), the role of the parental in principle cannot be elided. (136) While not sufficient for the creation of an illiberal counterproject, the role of the parental and reproductive is necessary to it (as it is necessary to human life). The methodological breakdown of the liberal monad can always be found in the anti-individuality of human reproduction, a fact that forces the theorists of radical liberalism to provide inconclusive answers as to whether children are individuals or property. They are, in fact, neither; and this baseline of communality is not a bad starting point for the construction of a new socialist order. Milbanks modification of paternalism with the word populist is, however, central, for a mere focus on the familial is no different from the pseudo-conservative or fascist defense of the family common in essentially liberal and capitalist projects (although this

rhetoric has become increasingly antiquated). In a similar vein, we might recall the fu mu guan or mother and father functionaries reviled by the youth of Tiananmen Square as a possible model for Milbanks populist and paternalist governmentality. To define collectivism as the expansion (or reexpansion) of familial relations to the community or to the nation for reasons described previously, the illiberal rejection of the nation, even if it is a bourgeois creation, is an unlikely prospect is not inaccurate, and, precluding much liberal critique of the kind that ultimately ended the USSR, provides the methodological basis for productive socialist organization. The East German State And The Catholic Church The analogous nature of the Christian and Marxist totalities having been discussed, and various theological and theoretical attempts at synthesis also having been covered, we may now give thought to the historical interaction of the two in their historical incarnations. Bernd Schaefers The East German State and the Catholic Church, a more or less prosaic account of the interactions of the two governing bodies during the several decades of the GDRs history, describes concisely the material manifestation of the principles discussed over the course of this work. Initially, in the first years of the GDR, each institution attempted to maintain an ambiguous and conciliatory approach to the other. The ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) maintained a strategy of allying with the churches(9), while, during a discussion with the Vatican, local bishops did not support the idea that Catholics had to resign from the SED and the mass organization (22). The states strategy of avoiding conflict in church matters went hand-in-hand with the complementary Catholic desire to avoid confrontation. Of Otto Spulbeck, the bishop of Meisen, Schaefer writes: Splbeck had never made a declaration of loyalty of the sort that the GDR wished to have, but he also never applauded the Federal Republics system. He clearly underestimated the political climate in the West, where his words [could be] appropriated to the detriment of the Catholic Church in the GDR to be used as a rejection of the GDR and praise of the FRG. Later figures in the Catholic Church came to realize even more deeply the danger of appearing to condemn the socialist system. Alfred Bengsch, the Bishop of Berlin, played the game with greater subtlety: Symptomatic of the churchs flexible diplomacy was Bengschs comment at the end of the meeting regarding clergy and church workers who had been arrested after 13 August: Bengsch characterized their offenses as stupidities. In contrast to the 1958 trials, the church organized no public protest against these arrests. Instead, it used quiet diplomacy signaling understanding for the states position but requested that it act with moderation. Two of the defendants were released two days after their conviction in December 1961: the other two were freed after Bengsch interceded personally on their behalf with Ulbricht. These were the last political arrests of Catholic clergy in the history of the GDR. Those who strove to maintain the existence of the Catholic Church in the GDR soon rationalized the Berlin Wall. Closing the escape valve created clarity and would lead the church to concentrate on the actual situation in East Germany rather than remain oriented to the West. This kind of acceptance could lead, as Splbeck put it in a talk in Erfurt on 25 October 1961, to a very fruitful period of religious work (90).

Under Bengsch, relations improved significantly, and a mutual scheme of laundering Western money in the name of socialism, charity or both soon developed (124-125). Interestingly, Bengsch, who worked tirelessly to prevent subordinate clergy from making any comment critical of the regime, unreservedly rejected the leftist or left-liberal currents of Catholicism popular around the time of the Second Vatican Council, in 1965 sending an extensive letter in Latin to Pope Paul VI, criticizing a document written by the latter entitled Gaudium et Spes, which assumed pluralist, parliamentary democracy as the norm (136). Condemning so-called pluralist society, Bengsch wrote that the document did not adequately address the defects in our culture masked by liberal conceptions of human progress (136). He did not receive a reply. By 1968, still resisting liberal currents in the East German Church, Bengsch stated: Concerning demands from some circles within the church for [freer] discussion and [more] information, we say that, in the specific case of the Catholic Church in the GDR, there are limits (146). As liberal tendencies in West German media increased through the 1960s, the state and the church embarked on a policy of joint censorship of these media under Bengsch, who stated that this literature penetrates our region through the radio, *and+ the ordinaries should be more vigilant against this tendency (146). By 1971, Bengsch wrote the following to the State Secretary for Church Affairs: The State should finally recognize in this case that we can indeed work together to educate our youth and that the church must be granted more latitude. Through religious instruction in school and by meeting the spiritual needs of our people, we can help clear away many things that might later also be harmful for the state. The state does not want our youth taught to be alcoholics, either, which can happen from many television programs from West Germany. (147) The state, which held a fairly negative view of Vatican II (161), responded enthusiastically, although many younger Catholics did not (147). In fact, Vatican-II era pluralism was altogether condemned by state officials, who realized that people critical of hierarchical practices within the church *+ were also critical of socialist society. Therefore, they believed that the church pluralist movement needed to be watched and possibly suppressed (154). This state of affairs continued amicably for some time; a papal visit to both Germanies ended with the pope being given a wristwatch by the West German president and a priceless Madonna statue by East German premier Erich Honecker (186). With the decline of Soviet power, the death of Bengsch in the late 1970s and the ascendance of Pope John Paul II eroded the alliance, and the young Catholics so dismayed by the bishops policy began to join a number of theatrical anti-state demonstrations (213). Despite attempts on Honeckers part to resist perestroika, in a decade the GDR was dead, crushed by the gigantic corpse of the USSR. Schaefer concludes: As in other socialist countries in Eastern Europe in those years, or among some in the Vatican, one could put a theological spin on the peculiarity of existence of the Catholic Church under dictatorial socialist conditions: Berlins Cardinal Meissner was fond of saying that in contrast to Westerners, GDR Catholics had less opportunity to sin. Seen from this perspective, the Berlin Wall and the tightly controlled German-German border shielded GDR Catholics from the kind of permissiveness and consumer-oriented practical materialism that could lead to a loss of Christian faith. (281) If there is any convergence at all between Christianity and Marxism, then, it is to be found primarily in the material output of those totalizing conceptions of the world, and in the historical and contemporary interactions of the two. Marxism, in its totalitarian governmental incarnation, not only freezes in place the bourgeois taboos at the time of the states inception, but actually to some extent reverses the social advancement of liberalism and produces an environment more amenable in the long run to traditional Catholicism than any other in the modern world. That the threat to Catholicism and to socialism of West

German radio took several decades to come to prominence as an issue can be attributed to the Marxist preservation of the MacIntyrean social taboos of the 1940s against alcoholism and free love, for instance as they began to fall to more advanced liberal critique in the capitalist countries. However, it would not be fair to assert that Marxism is only a more static form of liberalism. The return of the means of production to the hands of the worker and peasant classes which necessarily implies a return to localized and communal living spaces identical or analogous to those of precapitalist agriculture actually reversed the progress of liberal capitalism and gave rise to a social formation that might best, if seemingly contradictorily, be called traditionalist modernity. In this modernity, the totalitarian state replaces the medieval church as the mediator of the dialectic between the material and the ideal. While distinct, the material and moral ends of the two institutions in the service of slow social progress toward a more harmonious communality are less distinct in practice than might at first be suspected, as their joint campaign against liberalism generally and liberal Catholicism specifically demonstrates. Their direct confrontation, in opposition to the alienated pressures on religious bodies begotten of liberalism and capitalism, has potential for productive dialogue and even eventual alliance between the two. Schaefers account additionally demonstrates that, despite their appeals to leftist and Marxist principles, the reforms of Vatican II would not have occurred in a world predominantly afflicted with Marxist states. Whether traditional Catholicism is fully compatible with socialism is primarily a semantic argument lacking historical precedent, but that it is significantly more compatible with Marxist socialism than with liberal capitalism has been demonstrated. Closing remarks The Chinese Marxist revolutionary Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the Peoples Republic of China despite his aristocratic origins, was once asked for his comment on the French Revolution. He replied that it was too early to tell. The remark is still relevant. Now, after Tiananmen, it may even be applied to the Peoples Republic itself, that last great geopolitical representative of Marxist thought. Without having destroyed its peasantry or having compromised the mediating role of its communist party, China every year seems better poised to outperform liberal capitalism on its own terms. If it is successful in this endeavor, the world that we face in the 21st century may be one totally alien to the sensibilities of those who preached an end of history in the 1990s. I close with a few observations. Strange as it may seem, the PRC, like all communist governments, technically does not practice the separation of church and state. The communist enthusiasm for bureaus, it seems, overrides this injunction of secular civilization. Catholicism in China, for instance, is regulated by the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, established in 1957 by Mao Zedong. The Vatican has never declared it schismatic, and a direct epistolary dialogue between the Holy See and this association remains active. Secondly, Chinas diplomatic policy over the course of the past two decades has been to position itself as the greatest ally of the post-Soviet socialist and non-aligned countries, from the DPRK and Cuba to Iran and Venezuela, preserving their late modernism of the left against neoliberal postmodernity. The question of whether or not China is capitalist is therefore irrelevant in international terms. What is relevant is the countrys function as an obstacle to the creative destruction of the countryside and of socialist organization, and even, in its direct governmental confrontation of religious issues, to the alienated cooptation of religion in the name of state secularism. As I write, a new pope has just been chosen and a new general secretary appointed in the PRC. A few days ago, an article was published in The Atlantic entitled The Vatican and the Chinese Communist Party: More Similar than You Think. The pieces author, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, hopes to find a liberal reformer in the pontiff, Francis, and in the socialist premier Xi Jinping, men distinguished for their humility in hierarchies known for their opulence. This modesty, he indicates, is a sign that the patriarchs

mean to return to the fundamentals, to strip away the accumulated decadence of tradition in favor of purer Christian or socialist governance. If, however, the two leaders remember and understand the consequences of past reforms enacted by men like Savonarola and Gorbachev, and the great dangers of stripping away the material in favor of the ideal, Wasserstrom may be waiting a very long time for his reformations. The two options are clear. On the one hand, there is glasnost and perestroika, sola scriptura, broken mediation and hegemonic pseudo- or meta-pluralism. On the other, there is the quiet and confident administration of a governing body that is totalizing in its inclusivity and at peace with its material history, a collective and resilient brake on creative destruction. In this moment, after the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution and the end of the USSR, the interstices of capitalism still hide many such brakes. Only two of them govern one and one third billion people.