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Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism-1

September 15, 2005

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To begin my series of essays on Dr. Arendt's study of totalitarianism, I included two stills from the silent classic Metropolis. This movie, perhaps the finest silent ever, is a Whig political allegory of industrial relations. It depicts a dystopian future city dominated by towering skyscrapers, rooftop gardens with ineffable luxury, pampered and idle elites, and basements hundreds of meters down, where the workers toil 10 hours per day at excruciating and repetitive tasks. The leader of Metropolis, Fredersen, represents the conservative parties that had dominated British politics before 1905, and were now mobilizing against the threat of "Bolshevism" in Germany. He thunders that the workers belong in the basements, lest they get ideas and cause the Metropolis to implode.

Seething away in the bowels of the Metropolis are the workers, who gather to hear the soothing message of peace and hope from the living saint Maria. However, Fredersen learns that his son has become excessively curious about the plight of the workers and, worse, gotten a job to work like them. Fredersen dramatically finds his son, who has valiantly relieved an exhausted worker, now himself on the brink of collapse. He exclaims, "Father, ten hours a day is torture!" And indeed, it is, for the work involves an ergonomically stylized clock, with a two meter face; the workers must maneuver the hands constantly. No production is visible; it's inconceivable how this labor produces goods, inconceivable that the workers' demand can keep the Metropolis economy afloat, inconceivable that the workers accepted the creation of such a city and built it. This is an allegory; the cosmology of Metropolis mimics that of Norse mythology, with the middle part (Asgard) shrivelled to occasional stills of elevated boulevards threading through the forrest of skyscrapers.

Fredersen and his diabolical emanuensis, Rotwang, ponder the problem of festering labor relations; Rotwang reveals his latest invention, a robot of extraordinary intelligence and allure. Rotwang and Fredersen decide that they will capture Maria and replace her with the robot, disguised to look and sound like her. The robot will urge the workers to revolt, and this will allow a massive campaign of repression. Heads will role and quite possibly the proletarian class will be liquidated en masse to make way for a caste of robots. Fredersen's motives are confusing to most viewers; in review after review, people praised the movie for its groudbreaking use of sets and fantastical landscapes, only to lament that the plot made no sense: why would the master technocrat of Metropolis conceive a nihilistic robot to stir up the masses so he can destroy them to save his city?

The confusion provoked by this plot twist, and its equally puzzling denouement, would be greatly mitigated if people had read The Origins of Totalitarianism (Hannah Arendt, 1949/1967). Fredersen's motives are complex; so are those of Rotwang, the diabolical scientist whose exquisite facsimile of Maria undergoes a picaresque career as a vamp and Fanonist revolutionary. Rotwang conceived the robot to impersonate his lost love, Hel (named for a Norse goddess); long ago, Hel fell in love with Fredersen, rather than Rotwang, and subsequently died. Hence, one supposes that perhaps Rotwang is stimulated partly by jealous spite. Fredersen is the incarnation of the European bourgeoisie;* more, he is the apex of every bourgeois role. He is supreme industrialist and therefore supreme capital manager (the business of banking being rendered superflous). The absolute regimentation of production in the hands of Fredersen means retailers are merely impressarios for Christmas displays. This is capitalism, but not a market economy, since the bourgeois, having vested absolute power in the Arch-Tory Fredersen, are no longer exposed to the speculative risks of a market economy, and hence spend their time in the pursuit of pleasures.

This is the definition of superfluity; the one group of people whose every whim is catered to, are the ones whose sole social function is to consume the most refined imaginable things. They are both rescued from natural selection and made useless by the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

When we meet Freder, the pampered and beloved son of Fredersen, he is a member of this superfluous group. They have long been superfluous. However, Dr. Arendt refers to a period long ago when they became so:

The owners of little money lost so much so quickly [in the late 19th century] that the owners of superfluous big capital soon saw themselves left alone in what was, in a sense, a battlefield. Having failed to change the whole society into a community of gamblers they were again superfluous, excluded from the normal process of production to which [...] all other classes returned quietly, if somewhat impoverished and embittered. [...] As long as the owners of superfluous capital were content with investing [...] they merely confirmed their alienation from the national body on which they were parasites anyway. Only when they demanded government protection of their investments [...] did they re-enter the life of the nation. In this appeal, however, they followed the established tradition of bourgeois society, always to consider political institutions exclusively as an instrument for the protection of individual property [C.f. Grover Norquist & Robert Nozick—JRM]. Only the fortunate coincidence of the rise of a new class of property holders and the industrial revolution had made the bourgeoisie producers and stimulators of production. As long as it fulfilled this basic function in modern society, which is essentially a community of producers, its wealth had an important function for the nation as a whole. The owners of superfluous capital were the first section of the class to want profits without fulfilling some real social function...
[Chapter Five: The Political Emancipation of the Bourgeoisie, p.149]

Fredersen, the Lord & God of Metropolis, proposes the creation of the pseudo-Maria to "rescue" his son from his burgeoning love for her, and to further reduce the proletarian class. His mission is both propaganda and controlling: he wants his son to be disillusioned with radical politics, and he also eradicate for all time any threat to his authority.

A casual reader might at this point imagine that Lang and his screenwriter were Marxists. On the contrary, in 1926, when the film was made, this characterization of society was well-nigh impossible to debate. There was no question that the brief "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" in Europe was coming to an end, that even new aristocracies (viz., the scions of billionaires) were politically useless and pointless, and that the proletarian class was both exposed and explosive. In 1926, not even Ludwig von Mises would have contradicted such an assessment of European society. No, in 1926, what made Marxists distinctive was their diagnosis that this was the result of bourgeois ascendancy, and their prognosis that things would deteriorate until the capitalist order was swept away. Lang, whose views are those of the classic liberal (or Whig) clearly reject this because such a prognosis is nihilistic: Metropolis must be destroyed, the sooner the better. Fredersen/Rotwang's pseudo-Maria goes beyond Marx to Fanon: the conflict is racial, and the workers/üntermenschen will have to save themselves by destroying the material culture of Metropolis. What makes this so much more interesting is the way in which the pseudo-Maria uses sex to express Lang's dread of this Fanonist revolution: while the real Maria is like the Roman Catholic vision of Jesus's mother, the pseudo-Maria takes a decidedly unrobotic sexual delight in exhorting her proletarian audience to take prompt action and destroy; she distracts the bourgeois by appearing in their nightclubs with sequins on her nipples and a flimsy sarong about her loins, dancing lasciviously; her face is entirely transformed from anguished zeal to orgiastic risibility. For Lang, the Whig, the false-Maria captures two great nightmares: one, the patriot's loss of free will (when Maria is captured and her body mapped onto the robot), and two, the superfluous sexual energy of pampered idleness, ever seeking the ultimate kick, transformed into nihilism. Lang's vision depicts Marxism having succumbed not merely to Fanonism (as the message of agente-provacateur Maria), but to the clouded mental state of sexual arousal. While this is a clever twist, it only applies to the persona of the false-Maria, not to the hordes of exhausted workers she incites to mass sabotage.

The real Maria remains strapped to a gurney in the electric mansion of Rotwang; Fredersen's efforts to destroy his son's love of Maria backfires, and he is obligated to watch in horror as Freder, on the roof of the Medieval cathedrel, wrestles with Rotwang for the life of Maria. The horror changes Fredersen's motives; reconciled afterwards to the loss of his righthand man, he accepts Maria and resolves to submit to the Whig dream of a Middle Class republic.

It's easy to mock what Lang sees as a "happy ending." Metropolis isn't swept away; the superfluous bourgeoisie aren't lowered to the status of workers and the workers probably aren't elevated to the status of bourgeoisie. As a narrator, Lang is constrained by the objective reality: the much-noted architecture of Metropolis, after all, cannot be replaced in a single epoch by the egalitarian material culture of a Whig society. The "happy ending," in the sense that the workers aren't reduced or exterminated, is itself not terribly strong in plausibility. In a way, Lang could have saved himself a lot of criticism if he had merely shrugged his shoulders, laughed at the Whig fantasy of social salvation, and ended with a flooded Metropolis, with bloated corpses covering the surface of the water as far as the eye could see. Since this is not a review of Metropolis, but a series of essays about Arendt's Totalitarianism, I am obligated to move on to precisely this pessimistic parallel world—viz., the one we live in, not Lang's. (Part 2)

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES: I was delighted to find that "human" (Orange Clouds/Daily Kos) had expressed precisely my sentiments on the nexus of OoT and the late events in New Orleans:

While these words may sound harsh to some, what the events of the past week have shown us is that these same men and women appear to care as little about the lives of ordinary United States citizens as they do about the lives of ordinary Iraqi citizens, at least if they are poor and black. From its unconscionable budget cuts to levee reinforcement projects, to its crippling of FEMA, to its criminally negligent and incompetent failure to rescue drowning and dehydrating human beings in a timely manner, the policies of this administration have caused massive but still uncounted numbers of needless deaths, especially in the city of New Orleans.

Now, compare this to Dr. Arendt:

Logically, it is indisputable that a plan for world conquest involves the abolition of differences between the conquering mother country and the conquered territories, as well as the difference between foreign and domestic politics, upon which all existing nontotalitarian institutions and all international intercourse are based. If the totalitarian conqueror conducts himself everywhere as though he were at home, by the same token he must treat his own population as though he were a foreign conqueror. And it is perfectly true that the totalitarian movement seizes power in much the same sense as a foreign conqueror may occupy a country which he governs not for its own sake but for the benefit of something or somebody else. The Nazis behaved like foreign conquerors in Germany when, against all national interests, they tried and half succeeded in converting their defeat into a final catastrophe for the whole German people...
[Chapter Twelve: Totalitarianism in Power, p.416]

NOTE: * bourgeoisie: this word is commonly used as a toney synonym for Middle Class, presumably because people were introduced to the word in 9th grade social studies in the segment on the French Revolution, and then never used the word again unless they were reading parodies of Marxists (e.g., Larry Niven's & Jerry Pournelle's Oath of Fealty, where the Marxist [actually, heavy metal nihilist] bad guys are spewing phrases like "petty bourgeois" to refer to anything settled and providential). In fact, the word refers to the class of people whose wealth comes from management and ownership of the means of capitalist production. In the 19th century, the term was applied to the very top income cohorts: the industrialists, the merchant bankers, the shipping magnates, and the captains of trading houses.