In my previous post, I used the movie Metropolis to introduce Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism. For Dr. Arendt, the bourgeoisie comes of very like the subject of the Manet painting above: shameless, brash, useless, pampered... and naked. Naked, because useless: "The central inner-European event of the imperialist period was the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie, which up to then had been the first class in history to achieve economic pre-eminence without aspiring to political rule..."¹ Arendt outlines the phase of bourgeois ascendancy-without-power in previous chapters, but the general thrust is that the bourgeois were an unusual case of a class whose interests could only be served by a bona fide dictatorship of the bourgeois. Left to themselves, the competition between rival producers would lead ineluctably to the liquidation of the majority; unfettered market capitalism, indeed, invariably culminated in monopolies and ruined former capitalists.

In the economic sphere, expansion was an adequate concept because industrial growth was a working reality. Expansion meant increase in actual production of goods to be used and consumed. The processes of production are as unlimited as the capacity of man to produce for, establish, furnish, and improve on the human world. [...] Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limitations to its economic expansion. The bourgeoisie turned to politics out of economic necessity; for if it did not want to give up the capitalist system whose inherent law is constant economic growth, it had to impose this law upon its home governments and to proclaim expansion to be an ultimate political goal of foreign policy.

"The growth of large business is merely a survival of the fittest…the American Beauty rose can be produced in splendor and fragrance which brings cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working out of the law of nature and the law of God."
[John D. Rockefeller, sunday school address, 1920]

Ironically, the same demand for expansion had led ineluctably to a movement against it. Dr. Arendt and other historians often refer to this as the struggle between the state and the nation, or the conquest of the state by the nation (the victory of the middle class over the bourgeoisie). Having gotten the European powers into the expansion business, while avoiding the gigantic conflagrations of inter-European wars, the nationalist demagogues turned to genocidal savagery to master that process. Expansion, turned into a national project, meant the liquidation of subject peoples; this, because Black Africans could never be German, could never be Englishmen, could never be French, or any European nation.² The nation, meaning, the middle class and peasantry, or any other class of people with peculiar ties to the nation, was obligated to fight the bourgeois in the political realm over control of the state, and, according to Dr. Arendt, when the middle classes (AKA "the nation") won control over the state, the bourgeoisie were both defeated and politically emancipated. They could participate directly in a state that had heretofore been their nanny and their trustee; however, their vision of imperialism as a form of economic expansion was thwarted by the nationalist determination to expand nationally into the conquered territories.

The inner contradiction between the nation's body politic and conquest as a political device has been obvious since the failure of the Napoleonic dream. It is due to this experience and not to humanitarian considerations that conquest has since been officially condemned and has played a minor role in the adjustment of borderline conflicts. The Napoleonic failure to unite Europe under the French flag was a clear indication that conquest by a nation led either to the full awakening of the conquered people's national consciousness and to consequent rebellion against the conqueror, or to tyranny. And though tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.

The French, in contrast to the British and all other nations in Europe, actually tried in recent times to combine ius with imperium and to build an empire in the old Roman sense. They alone at least attempted to develop the body politic of the nation into an imperial political structure, believed that "the French nation (was) marching ...to spread the benefits of French civilization"; they wanted to incorporate overseas possessions into the national body by treating the conquered peoples as "both...brothers and subjects-brothers in the fraternity of a common French civilization, and subjects in that they are disciples of French light and followers of French learning."
["Political Emancipation of the Bourgeoisie"]

Olympia was soon replaced by another figure, that of the heavy swell (bawdy pun intended). Readers with a different aesthetic sense from mine perhaps will fail to find the delicious humor I did in juxtaposing these two paintings. I happen to know the painting, by Tissot, depicts a Col. Frederick Burnaby who died of a spear wound in Khartoum; I also happen to know he was physically very strong and very brave. However, in Tissot's painting, one's attention is drawn to the great splendor of his uniform; one can readily imagine the exaggerated langor of his drawl, the man of supreme calm in the midst of any calamity, who fluttered pulses when he said "Good morning," and glittered when he walked. This is the image people continue to have of the new nation-state's imperialism: self-confident men with gumption. I've seen photos of Reginald Dyer, too, and it must be said—he's a very handsome man. These were, however, bureaucrats of death, and they initiated a campaign of mass slaughter that would extinguish entire peoples.

Dr. Arendt deals briefly with the extermination of the Herrero people, or the genocidal management of the Belgian Congo; Sven Lindqvist, in Exterminate All the Brutes, dwells a little more on the massacre of different African and Aboriginal peoples, while Stuart Creighton Miller, in Benevolent Assimilation addresses the "administrative massacres" copiously employed in the Philippines. Arendt does not claim that these tactics led to the atrocities of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes, but does insist that they had similar origins. Both came from the expansionist motives of capitalism and the nationalist bigotry of teh victorious middle class.

My criticism of Dr. Arendt's thesis, in this particular point, is that the bourgeoisie is alleged to have a cohesiveness it lacked. Moveover, the classical Marxian analysis is flawed, insofar as there is no acknowledgement of the corporation and its role in the design of genocidal bureaucracies. In fact, the bourgeoisie were far too few in number and too languid in character to have people ruling on their behalf. The professional staff of a large corporation are often far more zealous and hidebound in their bloodthirstiness than the top managers. Those warbloggers who chirp about murdering "traitors" who question the President's actions, are probably perfectly respectable members of the middle class whose bloodlust stems from their frustration at their mundane, insignificant role in an endeavor that fascinates them. They are anonymous, not out of cowardice, but because they hate the fact that they are nobodies. Nor is there any meaningful cleavage between them and the bourgeoisie (on the one hand) and the middle class (on the other) to which they technically belong.

What made imperialism in Africa and South Asia so cruel was the battle for ecological control; had it merely been a struggle for political control, the imperial powers would merely have accomplished a coup, recruited technicians from the former ruling class, and governed without terror. Instead, the great majority of the population had to have their livelihoods disrupted, the men impressed into gang labor, and the women stuck as maids or prostitutes. The execution of a few political opponents would have sufficed, unless there was a need to get people to accept their massacre quietly. For the vast majority of human beings, in all times and places, the foundation of livelihood is farming or hunting. Ecological conquest, therefore, meant seizing the foundations of livelihood for the subject peoples, driving them off the land, and either into cities or graves.

In this sense, I disagree with Dr. Arendt that there ever was a conquest of the state by the nation. She could object, reasonably enough, that the corporation, being a state surrogate, was one of the instruments by which the middle class infiltrated and defeated "the bourgeois state" to bring it in line with national motives. However, the corporation and the principal of imperialism as ecological warfare, aren't touched upon. Whatever the reader might infer, these aren't major objections, though. Dr. Arendt is entirely correct in insisting that the violent disregard of individual liberty abroad, the nihilistic lawlessness of subjugation, and the racial priciples of global conquest, were eventually the thing that turned on the people of Europe and plunged it into the hell of totalitarianism.

(Part 3)