Hobson's Choice

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Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism-6

September 28, 2005

[ 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 ]

This series has not been a review so much as speculative notes. At various points I've taken issue with Dr. Arendt's ideas, but my objections have been minor and tentative. Since I began writing this series of essays, John C. Halasz has inspired me to read On Revolution. Since I have, and since I've been rereading passages of The Origins of Totalitarianism with Revolution-ary eyes, I'll try to integrate that into my perspective here.

Our post begins with my own modification of Giselle Beiguelman's modication of an unidentified face. The original image reflects a figure still recognizable as human, but visually shattered; the structure and texture of the image is exploded, creating a typical symbol of violence and motion—the infatuations of Futurism, an art movement of the early 1900's briefly embraced by totalitarian movements later in the century. Just as I began with an old science fiction movie that was really about the past, so I end with a work of art that is reflects the future as a discontinuous event—the future, specifically, as the shattering of that which we know from the past; the future as dystopia.

Many commentators, reading selected passages of The Origins of Totalitarianism (including me, obviously), immediately recognize alarming trends in the present day. For example:

Like a foreign conqueror, the totalitarian dictator regards the natural and industrial riches of each country, including his own, as a source of loot and a means of preparing the next step of aggressive expansion.... The trouble with totalitarian regimes is not that they play power politics in an especially ruthless way, but that behind their politics is hidden an entirely new and unprecedented concept of power, just as behind their Realpolitik lies an entirely new and unprecedented concept of reality. Supreme disregard for immediate consequences rather than ruthlessness; rootlessness and neglect of national interests rather than nationalism... The chief difference between the despotic and the totalitarian secret police lies in the difference between the "suspect" and the "objective enemy." The latter is defined by the policy of the government and not by his own desire to overthrow it...Practically speaking, the totalitarian ruler proceeds like a man who persistently insults another man until everybody knows that the latter is his enemy, so that he can, with some plausibility, go and kill him in self-defense.

While I seek to avoid personally implicating individual personalities in what I regard as a historical tragedy, it cannot be denied that the servants and emissaries of this president are given to insulting and confronting, or even attacking, the leadership of other countries until they have their "unfortunate security issue" with Iran, or Venezuela, or whomever.

I was extremely reluctant to mar my series of essays with what others might regard as a gratuitous rant; the more so, since I also have to admit that, were Dr. Arendt alive today, she should be quite perturbed that I was drawing parallels between the totalitarian movements (that sprang from huge, protracted national calamities such as this nation has not experienced since 1940) and the aggravations the Bush Administration. And indeed, I want to forcefully remind my readers that the USA is very far from being a fascist state. George W Bush is not Adolf Hitler, nor even Benito Mussolini. In fact, that's my original schtick as a weblogger:

Both "fascism" and "falangism" take their names from warfare, in ways that are intended to represent conformity or unity of purpose. The falangists, when in power, tended to sympathize with fascist regimes because of the tremendously effective social regimentation they brought about; but usually it was agreed that the industrial enterprise of Latin American or Middle Eastern countries would not sustain the type of aggressive regulation favored by thorough-going fascism. But under fascism, state power was directed against everyone; the elites who owned banks or industries were regimented and vulnerable, and their children usually were compelled to serve in the armed forces to ensure conformity. Under falangism, the elites have their own gangs who actually find the state repression convenient, but inadequate; the death squad is a familiar fixture of falangist states. Death squads act outside of the framework of the falangist state; the elites exploit the state, but are not under it. In the fascist state, the panic of the elites allows them to submit to totalitarian rule.
[Please see also The Watch]

Nor am I declaring that the "movement conservatives" are falangists, since of course falangism is a type of regime that is created by thwarted fascists; there aren't people out there who consciously want to create a falangist regime, although I'm sure there are many who would not object if one arose.

My point in bringing it up at all is to make an entirely new argument, or rather, one I have never seen made: that the technology of totalitarian movements and their control over nations made a radical change after the War. While Dr. Arendt quite rightly rebuked the elites of the pre-War years for assuming that the totalitarian leaders would bend ineluctably to objective reality, and conform to utilitarian principles (when they instead obliterated the nations they ruled), it remains the case that the rise of the totalitarian movements themselves were the result of conscious decisions made by the economic elites to preserve their priviledged positions at all costs.¹ Once they had forged the regime into a weapon that destroy their enemies, it did. It did, indeed, and it actually destroyed a comparatively small number of them. But, it did so remorsely; it operated on them as one might on a mountain of raw material, grinding them like drop-forged part into the finished instrument of future social movement.

In my previous installment, I referred to "the use of terror as a tool of control." This is the topic of the last chapter of The Origins of Totalitarianism, "Ideology and Terror," and it does not refer to terrorism as a form of communally rootless insurgency, but rather, to the state's war on the nation; to the struggle of the state, now under the "movement's" control, to destroy the private life, and make public every human act. In such a war, there can be no laws since no state can be so providential to fulfill every human need (least of all, one lacking accountability or feedback), and hence, every human becomes a state enemy. If there are laws, then there is conformity to the laws, and hence, innocence as a function of behavior.

...Positive laws were changing and changeable according to circumstances, but they possessed a relative permanence as compared with the much more rapidly changing actions of men; and they derived this permanence from the eternal presence of their source of authority. Positive laws, therefore, are primarily designed to function as stabilizing factors for the ever-changing movements of [people].
In the interpretation of totalitarianism, all laws have become laws of movement. When the Nazis talked about the law of nature or when the Bolsheviks talk about the law of history, neither nature nor history is any longer the stabilizing source of authority for the actions of mortal men; they are movements in themselves. Underlying the Nazis' belief in race laws as the expression of the law of nature in man, is Darwin's idea of man as the product of a natural development which does not necessarily stop with the present species of human beings, just as under the Bolsheviks' belief in class-struggle as the expression of the law of history lies Marx's notion of society as the product of a gigantic historical movement which races according to its own law of motion to the end of historical times when it will abolish itself.
[Ibid; italics added]

This is the baseline of the totalitarian movement. This is what it "wanted"; it was a "process," a "natural" or "organic" event in the sense that it was supposedly inevitable; opposing it was worse than futile, balking at its excesses was mere absurdity. However, the totalitarian movements of the future will learn (or already have learned) from the calamity of the Nazi and the Stalinist experiences. First, the problem of production has been "solved" [sic.]² and there is no longer the need to mobilize labor and capital to solve it. The real problem is that the one group of people who are indispensible to the industrial system, the ones who can organize technical planning and development, are the ones most likely to develop skepticism about the industrial system itself. In other words, in the past, the "social problem" involved the malheureux, the wretched. There are still wretched today, but they are largely out of reach; they are not a threat. The "social problem" of today, as far as the industrial elite are concerned, is prudential: the class of technical wonks that chose John Kerry and Al Gore as their saviors, are threatening not as leftists at all, but because they are prying at the veil of ignorance, the one that hides our ecological calamity from the nation.

Our totalitarian movement does not send millions of kulaks to mass graves, nor does it haul millions of arbitrarily selected human beings to gas chambers in cattle cars. Instead, the holocaust is the foundations of life on this planet, and the revolution is technological. Imperialism spawned expansionism as a movement, with new laws and new principles of legality; now that expansion is not into space, nor (militarily) into a gigantic underdeveloped country (Iraq and Afghanistan will not suffice for this purpose). Nor is expansion into space. Expansion, today is into, and against, the planet Earth and the constraints it imposes on our will to will. As humans craving pleasure and leisure, there is ample bounty for everyone; as restless consumers for the sake of employment and glory, there is not enough room on this planet for the two of us.

NOTE: 1 At this time, I am reading Felix Deutscher's biography of Joseph Stalin and E.H. Carr's Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926-1929, Vol. 2. My impression, based in part on Deutscher Chap. 8 "The Great Change" is that Stalin's movement was driven chiefly by an entirely new cohort (not yet, I would say, a proper "class") of industrial managers. The constant tension between industrial interests and rural farming interests always was a constant problem after the Revolution, and my impression is that the farming interests didn't have a chance once the professional managers had developed a uniform set of convictions about where their future lay.

One of the shocking discoveries about what Deutscher calls "the Great Change" is that a strictly non-private class of industrial managers can be so utterly ruthless on behalf of their agenda. The agenda was to exploit the immense industrial potential of Russia at the expense of the rest of the 90% or so of the economy dedicated to agriculture; this would end forever Russia's vulnerability to the Western nations, and incidentally, eliminate forever any class that might be higher than themselves.

2 The problem of production is that, in an industrializing society, scarcity is so urgent because of capital outlays and the high cost of urban living, that people must be induced to work very hard despite horrible incentives. For Europe, the USA, and pre-War Japan, this "solution" was the "labor market," complete with massive unemployment. It was subject to chronic depressions and, relative to our modern experiences, pathetically slow growth rates. Of course "the problem of production" has not been solved. From the point of view of the top economic managers, it has; the only possible difficulty is the impending oil crisis, which (from their point of view) is a political problem, not a technical or administrative one. The ecological disaster of industrial agriculture, now a well-established fact in the USA, CIS, PRC, and 3rd world, is another much-denied grounds for rejecting this. However, we are not concerned with what I think; we are concerned with what the partisans of our current industrial system think, and that is utterly un-ambiguous complacency about their own "stewardship" of the earth's finite resources.

It is incredible that anyone could still imagine our industrial system is sustainable, and perhaps no one does. But if so, then we are living in the proverbial "matrix" and you, Dear Reader, are just dreaming that you're reading this.