Hic Rhodus, hic salta!
–Aesop, Aesop’s Fables
I. Marxists, of course, are no strangers to crisis. Capital is commonly taken as a work of social science, demonstrating the lawful inevitability of capitalist crisis, and with it, the historical inevitability of a revolutionary response. Everything hinges on how “inevitability” is interpreted: the perceptive radical—or the incredulous reactionary, sensing, despite himself, a metaphysical kinship—detects the residue of theology in this purportedly scientific doctrine. Dialectical materialism, as a kind of apostate Christianity, unconsciously reenacts its central narratival motifs; our age of exploitation and alienation as a secularized Fall, the redemption of this condition transferred from Christ to the proletariat, whose historical mission becomes imbued with a borrowed eschatological inevitability.
II. An act is only possible in a world responsive to our actions. The chief defect of theological inevitability—that of scientific Marxism included—is that it robs the world of this dignity of the act, calcifying possibility into brute necessity. History now takes place behind our backs. Our reality, our essential condition, is reduced to mere waiting.
III. Tradition reveals two responses to waiting: resignation and passion. Resignation leads to a systematic, rationalized theology, eliminating all traces of doubt and contingency with recourse to an empty formal logic. Passion, being ultimately unsustainable, reverts to nihilism.
- Technocratic neoliberalism and so-called “luxury communism” are in this sense both resigned. In the ecological crisis, the former only sees more opportunities for investment in the midst of natural disasters, with the formal laws of capital dictating new markets in fracking, carbon trading, and disaster insurance. The latter, despite its radical pretensions, also ultimately depends upon the logic of capitalist production. Excited by new innovations in geo-engineering, artificial intelligence, and automation, this political vision is premised upon further developing the forces of production, allowing the decadence of the first world to remain unchallenged while effecting an effortless transition to luxury communism. Kohei Saito concludes that such a politics “gives up the revolutionary subjectivity of the working class and accepts the reified agency of machines as the subject of history.”
- The rise of what psychologists call eco-anxiety concludes the era of passion for the environmental movement. Gone are the utopian hopes of earlier activist generations. Confronting a world unresponsive to environmental action, the only thing left for the activist is to change the world at its only remaining free point; that is, within man himself. But inward action, frozen in self-imposed impotence, eventually devolves into ethical individualism and psychological self-flagellation.
IV. Nature, quite anachronistically, has regained a religious quality; it is at once made an object of rationalization and passion. A vast social machinery hovers over nature, dividing and gathering, seemingly impervious to human control. Floods, rains, droughts, disease: an archaic pestilence makes an unwelcome return.
V. “The property-owning class and the class of the proletariat,” writes Marx, “represent the same human self-alienation. But the former feels at home in this self-alienation and feels itself confirmed by it; it recognises alienation as its own instrument and in it possesses the semblance of a human existence. The latter feels itself destroyed by this alienation and sees in it its own impotence and the reality of an inhuman existence.” The bourgeois recognize themselves in their self-created alienation; resignation and passion are their natural attitudes. The proletariat reacts altogether differently. To see the “reality of an inhuman existence” is to puncture the theological necessity undergirding the hegemonic structures which govern social life. For the oppressed, no justification is satisfactory.
VI. The preceding considerations prompt another look at the theory of crisis. For crisis is nothing else than the radical reintroduction of contingency into an ossified mechanical system. The apologists and priests of capital, whose conceptual structures have already been so assimilated to the ideal of an unchanging, ahistorical necessity, cannot view a crisis—the revelation of the radically new—as anything other than an incomprehensible, cataclysmic event. But for those who see the reality of an inhuman existence, a crisis is a process, rather than an event; that is, a moment within a continually contradictory social process, always existing underneath the daily life of bourgeois society.
VII. Marxism, stripped of its metaphysical character, is at first glance a quasi-Aristotelian project; investigating the virtuous—for us, revolutionary—act. But it cannot start at the point of the isolated individual; still less can it extrapolate historically invariant ethical ideals for action from such a point. Rather, it asks the more fundamental question: under what conditions is an act possible in the first place? If this question is left unanswered, perhaps the kinds of projects we had been involved in, which we took to be active and world-changing, turn out to be mere extensions of our vanity.
IX. It is often said that Marxism has no space for ethics. To this we answer that Marxism is the only doctrine that can create a space for ethics; all other ethical theories remain purely theoretical, exhorting the isolated individual to follow a labyrinth of abstract moral duties. Only by grounding normativity in social reality does ethics lose this abstract character. Crisis reveals a privileged domain where action is possible.
X. Interviewer: Now the question naturally arises: Can the individual man in any way still influence this web of fateful circumstance? Or, indeed, can philosophy influence it? Or can both together influence it, insofar as philosophy guides the individual, or several individuals, to a determined action?
Heidegger: If I may answer briefly, and perhaps clumsily, but after long reflection: philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in our decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline. […]
We can not bring him forth by our thinking. At best we can awaken a readiness to wait.
The world is burning, and no gods can save us. We will wait no longer.
