organization – Infrapolitical Reflections

We owe an untimely intuition about the enduring seduction of patriotism and nationalism to Leo Tolstoy’ essay “Patriotism and Government” (1900), in which he captured a paradoxical phenomenon: mainly, that at the same time that the integration of humanity and its historical consciousness reached its civilizational peak, patriotism instead of disappearing became increasingly more destructive and fierce. Looking at the outset of the First World War in Europe and its nascent total mobilization of industries, the Russian novelist claimed that, from that moment, government organization will depend on patriotism as a source to conduct total war within the human species. But what surprised Tolstoy – which has clear contemporary overtones in the impolitical movements that dominate Western societies – was the degree that this lethal patriotism infiltrated the very worldview and orientation of the Christian vocation. Tolstoy writes in the most most potent passage of the essay:

“All the peoples of the so-called Christian world have been reduced by patriotism to such a state of brutality, that not only those who are obliged to kill or be killed desire slaughter and rejoice in murder, but all the people of Europe and America, living peaceably in their homes exposed to no danger, are, at each war – thanks to easy means of communication and to the press – in the position of the spectators in a Roman circus, and, like them, delight in the slaughter, and raise the bloodthirsty cry, ‘Pollice verso.’ [1].

This should suffice to note that for Tolstoy patriotism is neither a political ideology nor a formal principle of community; patriotism is rather a social liturgy born of the absolute sacrazalization of human life and whose hyperbolic figure will be that of the war-slave trained to endure “the act” (especially the slave that participates in the carnage through his words and attention). And just like in a theater play or in the Catholic liturgy where there are “acts” (and the service can only subsist through its enactment), the unleashed force of patriotism becomes a form of destruction as the essence of government organization.

This is why for Tolstoy the inception of total war recalibrates the grotesque spectacle through the “hypnotism of patriotism”, positing a fictional belonging of salvation – that is nontheological because it is unredeemable – through the destruction of another community of the human species. True, the end of politics always results in war; although Tolstoy introduces a nuance to this axiom: war is able to subsist thanks to the self-affirmation of patriotism as the triumph of a wordless inhumanity.

It is no coincidence that Tolstoy observed the rise of patriotic strife in tandem with modern science as conquest over Nature and the reality of human experience [2]. Thus, government patriotism and instrumental sciences are two interconnected regimes of the organization inhumanity that speak the rhetoric of growth and prosperity as stagnation deepens. In our days, this social cohesion, as Tolstoy warned with precision more than a century ago, has entered a new phase of domination that some called a “lethal form” integrating technology and war without any reminder [3].

Notes

1. Leo Tolstoy. “Patriotism and Government” (1900), in Last Steps: The Late Writings (Penguin Books, 2009), 318.

2. Leo Tolstoy. “Modern Science” (1898), Last Steps: The Late Writings (Penguin Books, 2009), 252.

3. Alexander Karp. The Technological Republic (Crown Currency, 2025), 154.

There is something insufficient and risible in the attempt to isolate notions like “revolution” or “emancipation” from the total collapse of the grammar of politics. This insufficiency speaks to a rhetorical inflation which already at the turn of the twentieth century Carlo Michaelsteader identified with the attempt at securing the social bond at all costs. The rhetoric of “saving” (the revolution, emancipation, liberation: saving the subject) at bottom, only shows the simulacra of a redemptive movement of value at the heart of social exchange. And we also know that modern political revolutions were experiments in general socialization. Whether it is Saint-Just appealing to the laws of nature against the positive social contract in the wake of the French Revolution; or Lenin and the Bolsheviks more than a century later in their efforts to stage a utopia of production and classless society, the revolutionary horizon was ultimately about the production of the social bond and little else.

The dialectization between subject and the totality of the modes of production was realized in its reverse: the passage to a new temporal domination unto all sensual activities of life. This was expected given the premise: at the center of the genesis of political organization of the West is not the state, but rather the rhetorical structures of civility. That the last theoretical project of politics hinges on the so-called “rhetorical foundations” of society now comes full circle: the development of civilization in the open.

Of course, revolutionary and emancipatory imagination, except in rare occasions, has always been oblivious to the problem of civilization. And this is why Fordism and high Stalinism were perceived as civilizational projects that mirrored and competed against each other. In this sense, the civilizational rise never escaped the duality between politics and nihilism that is proper to the anxiety over order in the genesis of modern European public powers. This is also why early in revolutionary moments of triumph the excess of barbarism was never left behind, but rather it emerged as its siamese twin of the humanist enterprise. As Merleau-Ponty hinted in his old book Humanism and Terror (1947): “Even though our political life creates a civilization we can never renounce, does it not also cointan a fundamental disease?” [1]. This was Ponty in 1947, where the debris of the war was still in full display in major European cities. To some extent one could imagine not wanting to renounce civilization of such barbarism in the face of atomic disaster. But is this our predicament today? Obviously not, since, precisely the collapse of politics (and its main institutional forms such as positive law and political parties) also amounts to an ongoing crisis that is civilizational in nature.

It is not surprising that what emerges in front of us is a different typology than the one that Merleau-Ponty witnessed in 1947: it is no longer the piling of rubbish, but the rise of metropolitan paradises that organize the infrastructural regime of a contactless world. A decade later, written in the 1950s, Amadeo Bordiga will redefine the stakes of civilization: “…the vigorous coarseness of the barbarian peoples was less dire than the decadence of the masses in the capitalist epoch, the epoch that our enemies name as civilization – a word used well here, and in its proper sense, because it means the urban way of life, the way of life proper to the great amalgamated monsters of the bourgeois metropolises” [2]. Bordiga’s lucidity was capable of grasping that Fordism as the triumph of the utopia of capital now meant that civilization (now reduced as the allocation of exchange and distribution) became the central figure of nihilism. Perhaps Bordiga was too imprudent to call for the shadow of the civilized – that is, the barbarian – but his problem, I take it, is still ours to reflect upon.

Notes

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Humanism and Terror (Beacon Press, 1969), xxxviii.

2. Amadeo Bordiga, “Specie umana e crosta terrestre”, in Drammi gialli e sinistre della moderna decadenza sociale (Iskra, 1978), 95. My translation.