Bourgeois individuals are “politicized” when they are positively
concerned about the organization of the political rule they are subjected to. They
are completely at ease speaking of the compulsory national relationship they have
to obey as a community they want: “we.” All the annoyances the state
causes them is the starting point for critical opinions aimed at
improving its rule. Hostility to rule is not declared in these opinions;
rather, politics is constructively confronted with alternatives for carrying it
out.
In all their variety, the critical judgments of responsible
citizens achieve in substance only one thing: they split off the negative effects
of politics from its purpose, so that those affected act disappointed
— which can only be done by consistently disregarding the economic reason
for state power. As far as the formal side of civic opinion forming is
concerned — the attitude displayed — one cannot fail to notice in all
the griping the pretended disappointment, the separation between
expressed complaint and practical intent. Even the most indignant and
disparaging opinion is recognizably the utterance of an individual who attaches
no importance to his own judgment and is not refusing obedience, who is not the
least bit serious about looking for ways and means of putting his objection
into practice.
When arguing as “we taxpayers,” those affected feign
an attitude of entitlement — the pack of journalists is busy acting for
everyone in this way — an attitude that is always completed by the “demand” for
others to be restricted more thoroughly. Statesmanlike recipes for dealing
with all those who “go too far” — always sparing the ruling class — rank
alongside scornful findings on “one’s” representatives, “one’s”
trampled-on rights, and innapropriate social, economic and foreign
policies. Civil servants incur the sincerest hatred from the regulars at
the local pub, while a career in the civil service would be just the right
thing for one’s own children, and the nation’s highest civil servants are shown
a respect that can easily compete with the worship of pre-bourgeois
ruling figures. A citizen will let a presidential candidate talk about things,
and prescribe them, as “objective necessities” in a way he would never let his
neighbor get away with. Election campaigns are conducted, and decided
by citizens entitled to vote, according to criteria that show not even a
semblance of “rational” (= calculating) reflection, so that election campaigns
are subject to fierce criticism of their style on the part of their central
figures.
The democratic state thus always includes a minority of
disappointed devotees of a stronger state, whose “arguments” are
admittedly shared by the majority. They inspire anti-Fascist fans of a just
state to try to rescue and expand the substance of democracy — and there is
also the oppositional alternative of a “life without repression”1
that begins here and now.
For the rest, both rightists and leftists can feel entitled
to commit crimes as political practice, claiming that the power
exercised by the state doesn’t do justice to their notion of justice. The
former want order to be properly established at last; the latter personally
declare war on it. And neither line of terrorism needs to worry about its
“breeding ground.” It’s the same one.
The critique of democratic consciousness and the analysis of
political practice is not a psychological matter. It aims at refuting
the arguments that political adversaries bring to bear for their cause, showing
the untruthfulness of their arguments, and denouncing the interests their
arguments are meant for. For that reason, this chapter does not describe
democracy and misguided struggles for and against it,2 but
merely the feats of the mind that are performed by a submissive free will. It
deals with the attitude of individuals who are confronted with the effects of
the power of the state “superstructure” while agreeing to it, and who moreover
always judge their own economic experience by the standard of fair treatment of
a righteous citizen.
In the civic “we” that he insists on using when discussing
every affair of state, the modern individual aligns himself in all his
righteousness with the rule he submits to. He generously overlooks society’s
antagonisms and discusses himself and his interests as the actual
purpose of political power. While those who have a say and benefit from the
relations of power that protect person and property always say “we” when making
demands on the losers, the latter allow themselves the noble gesture
of consenting by merely complaining that this “we” is poorly realized.
The submission they have carried out customarily becomes an argument for
the right to make critical comments, so that these comments never lose their
character of expressed disappointment. The ploy of being a taxpayer,
with which one proves oneself definitely entitled to get worked up over some
government measure, illuminates the desolate need of citizens who are so smug
about their blasé attitude toward power: their declared interests always boil
down to their wish that the state not bestow so many favors on others, or as
the case may be, that it has to be stricter in dispensing justice to them,
while the complaining individuals pose as its legitimate victims. When regulars
talking politics at the pub resort as citizens to badmouthing injustice from
those “on top” like this, their objection ends all debate: they don’t
find some deplorable state of affairs, get incensed about it and then seek the
reasons for it; much less ponder the question, “What is to be done?”3 because
the pride of a righteous person displeased with his government has been fully
satisfied with his expressed disappointment. Statesmen of all orders of
magnitude are well aware of this and “explain” their every action as helping to
assert the inalienable right of taxpayers. No matter whether they are putting
up nuclear power plants or building up the army and celebrating public tattoos to
swear in drafted recruits — they always land at the satisfaction being given to
the esteemed taxpayer.
So there is actually some truth to the rumor that political
power in a democracy lives on the criticism of those who feel the brunt
of it. For the criticism mustered by all responsible citizens — responsible
because they’re concerned with getting recognition for their righteousness —
amounts to nothing more than the formal accusation of the state of failing to
comply with its principles, which they wholeheartedly share; not exactly
a declaration of war on the public power. Those affected do not quarrel
with their state on the basis of a cost-benefit calculation; rather, they act
as if they were starting this calculation anew every day and discovering their
commonwealth hardly paid off any more. Being on the receiving end simply is
not their argument, because they insist on the standards set by the
state for its “mission,” deriving from this above all else the moral authority
to throw their disadvantage into the discussion. Instead of registering an
objection, they untiringly agree in their accusations with friend and
foe alike on principles against which “one” allows not a single word to be
said: the entirety of democratic criticism is made up of offensively puffed-up
hypocrisy, the insistence that one is being cheated out of accepted values, out
of the reward for one’s righteousness.
When disappointed individuals, so self-assured in their
disappointment, follow up their “criticism” with the answer to the question of
guilt, they always end up finding the state and its representatives not
guilty. After all, their agreement when it comes to “principles,” by which
they legitimize their indignation, represents an abstraction they have carried
out from the purpose of all politics, so that the accusation that accepted
purposes have not been carried out can be productively elaborated. Many
a statesman must put up with being attacked as a would-be benefactor because he
is unable to cope with his party, this or that force, or just “developments”
per se. Such phantom issues, which make ruling so difficult, are conjured up
in reams by an “ordinary person” — without a first-class diploma or
professional license — when he certifies one politician as being “incompetent”
while announcing his trust in another for being equal to the “problems”: the
arms race, wage-price spiral, bureaucracy, technical progress, growth,
political apathy, national debt — and whatever other things one might dream up
that politicians have to cope with.
The harsh criticism with which the individual, fully aware
of the seriousness of the situation, finally resolves to make his choice at the
polls always goes essentially along the same lines: incompetence in
achieving everything the citizen thinks matters in politics. As a voter,
the self-assured citizen either allows that his rulers “know their business” or
else denies it, and in this method, which reflects little knowledge of what
goes on in politics, the loyal subject achieves his finest quid pro quo: he
manages to act as if he were the inspector and touchstone of a political
power solely out to use him — but only by once again making the
refutation of his standpoint part and parcel of it. He votes for the “lesser
evil” and even thinks he’s clever for realizing that his wishes will not
be fulfilled by the future government. That is why he attaches little
importance to the dim view he takes of politicians — he simply votes for the
“evil” that most appeals to him personally, because it presents itself entirely
the way he as a citizen would act if he were a politician!
6.4. Nation as sentiment and character
A righteous person won’t hear anything against
the “we” in whose name alone demands are made and criticism is voiced in a
democratic community. After all, this “we” is the point of view from which he
in all seriousness judges everything that happens to him, i.e., organizes down
to the last detail his view of the “forces” that make this world go round and
his worries and pleasures concerning them. In nationalism, the citizen’s
hypocrisy turns honest, and indeed all the more so, the more
consistently the calculations of personal gain he pins on it are wrecked by the
authority’s actual deeds: he shows pride and indignation in the name and
in the interest of the rule with which he, as a self-assured subject, both knows
himself to be, and feels, joined in solidarity, even and especially when its
momentarily topmost executors do not suit him.
National sentiment is never at a loss for
occasions to express itself, even if its holder’s notion of how the nation’s
interests are faring has nothing much to do with how they are actually being
carried out. In his view, the way the age of imperialism has happily so
completely seen through the dividing up and sorting out of mankind according to
citizenship is the result and the expression of a kind of a fairly natural
diversity of the various peoples; and just as the righteous citizen, who
in other contexts regards many a national comrade to all intents and purposes
as enemies and wants them treated as such, might now forgive(s) them in the
name of their common nation — unless conversely he crowns his proclamation of
justice for them with the utmost accusation of national treason! — he
finds foreigners suspicious simply because they are not natives: doesn’t
the disposition to comply with a rule other than one’s own have to entail a
different and therefore inferior or at least questionable sort of
righteousness? Although the citizen, thinking open-mindedly along
the same lines as his government and its public opinion, lets them dispel
worries of this kind as soon as reasons of state dictate a higher degree of
“friendship among peoples” with a neighbor, he is very quick to be reminded of
them again — and not even the most dizzying swings in the configuration
of this ethnology for the people will make a decent person draw the conclusion
that he is making himself the useful idiot for his rulers’ diplomacy by his
multiply varied and embroidered aversion to foreign peoples. Every
difference to the rest of the world that he discovers in his own national “we”
makes him proud, even if he knows nothing about the matter in question and
doesn’t even think much of it himself. When this absurd comparison becomes a
public event, masses that otherwise never come together for a normal
demonstration then readily demonstrate how much the nation’s honor actually
means to them quite personally. Everyone, in Germany for instance, has cobbled
together some conception of history from won or lost soccer games, wars
waged by past rulers and tyrants, the “lost” Second World War, and the regained
international standing of German industry, cobbled in such a way that it does
the holder, be he professor or hairdresser, the desired service, that is,
provide his imagination with the means for producing pride and indignation in
just the mixture and with the thrust required by the international situation of
the moment — and for his own efforts to keep up with the march of history. When
a war is finally on the agenda again, its organizer has always been able to
rely on its subjects’ habit of regarding even their own existence with
considerable aplomb from the point of view that the national “spirit of
resistance” is without doubt historically justified. And it can rely equally on
its intellectuals, who normally cultivate their national pride chiefly or
exclusively on the lofty level of the nobler cultural riches, and therefore
like to combine it with plenty of scorn for the “crude” nationalism of the
common people and a cosmopolitan attitude fed by this scorn and a special
preference for particular peoples; concerning the lie and the brutal
truth of the general heading “defense” under which modern states carry out
their worldwide terrorism, the national intelligentsia at most come up with
fastidious doubts about the “unpolished” style displayed by the national
authority in this area.
Naturally, the everyday effort of enjoying or suffering
along with the presented successes or failures of one’s own nation also bears
its fruits in the inner life of individuals so intensively occupied. Someone
who makes it a habit of especially esteeming or disdaining specific idiocies of
bourgeois life in himself and others under the heading of national
characteristics, and thus in either case cultivating them as such, does not
first need to take such a radical step as marrying from the point of view of
racial hygene to end up actually producing a “national character” in
himself and his children. It is not naively, but with a calculating orientation
of their own prejudices and preferences according to the customs esteemed or
disdained as national, that modern citizens devote a good part of their
lifetime to the all too successful effort to develop, quite beyond all real
regional differences in living conditions, a special narrow-mindedness that
makes their fatal wish come true: of their own free will being character masks
of that national “we” that they celebrate in their national anthem with a
pleasurable shudder.
6.5. Radical dissent: The fight for the right to criticize
The intention, easily seen in all critical grumbling, not to
overly embarrass one’s own self-esteem with the submission one practices, that
is, to at least accompany it by opinion that testifies to a free will — this
obviously pretended insistence on one’s own interests constitutes for
the citizen the starting point for various actions within the framework
of a “movement.” After all, the contradiction between more or less
vociferously proclaiming one’s discontent and political pussyfooting quite
logically provokes the accusation that he should either keep his mouth
shut or give his opinion credibility by “getting involved.”
Of course there is nothing good about his resolving to get
serious about his critical attitude toward the state. It matters to the utmost
what sort of discontent in which movement with what goals is overcoming the
“contradiction between theory and practice”! When self-assured citizens
and nationalists lament the decay of their political rule and think all their
righteousness and willingness to make sacrifices deserves better appreciation
and utilization by the state, they can “get involved” in a fascist
organization, blame just about everything that displeases them on the state
being too lax and degenerate — and become violent models for friends of the
people who have not yet “gotten involved.” When disappointed citizens judge
their political rule by the entitlements it “really should” concede to its
righteous subjects but “actually” denies them, the result is a “fight for
rights,” for purchasing power and working-class children at universities — that
is, a movement opposing “state monopoly capitalism.” The point of view of needs
that are refused recognition by state “repression” can also be applied to the
transition from mere griping to a “practical” movement, and a look at
“meaningful” and “alternative” living shows that opposition put into practice
occasionally turns into a new sort of contentedness as well as a line of
business.
Ideologists of democracy firstly will not hear anything
about the differences that come about when criticism stops being the
theoretical accompaniment to practical submission; for the mere difference to
good conduct suffices to draw the line between the opposition’s “world views”
and democrats’ “reason.” Secondly, this legal finding is at the same time very
well suited for making “deviant behavior” and “psychological dispositions”
responsible as the reason for such entirely incomprehensible practices,
so that the democratic foundations of the extrademocratic spectrum are made to
disappear psychologically.
Crime I: Terror as a just use of force, autonomously
Finally, the question of the breeding ground for
terrorism would be taken care of if something other than the criminal
nature of the deviance were attested to. For it is the hypocritical
demand to “get involved,” with which especially political reps on the campaign
trail try to induce young people to join in constructively, that is taken dead
seriously by terrorists in their own way. They are also quite taken with the
thinking of politicians that a juster use of force can achieve a lot of good.
They even appreciate the advice, “If you don’t like it here, get lost!” which
attests to democratic longing for appropriate treatment of leftists: some people
just “deserve” freedom and others don’t. Since terrorists of “leftist” origin
are thus by no means cynical, instead directing the weight of
morality against its hypocritical beneficiaries who always use force, they
turn into advocates and engineers of quite exquisite crimes that are committed
not out of self-interest but for the people.
Terrorists from the “right,” who condemn the people in the
name of law and order and are not squeamish about executing their verdict,
complete the wealth of alternatives exhibited by the democratic reconciliation
of “theory and practice,” discontent and action. So there is no lack of
opportunities for true democrats, who consider their submission to be a
nonviolent state of affairs, to be alarmed by “the use of force as a means of
politics” — otherwise, especially in wartime, they don’t have time to be.
6.6. Education for freedom and responsibility
In their efforts to make children into useful adults,
schools and parents are exceedingly economical with the knowledge and ability
they pass on to the new generation — unerringly producing precisely in this way
the correct views and attitudes in the young mind. In mom and dad’s compliments
on going to bed and getting up early, which is known to make a man healthy,
wealthy and wise, a quick child soon enough hears the message that even with
sleeping, the crucial thing is to prove some virtue in order to earn the
next “pleasure”; the next day the same lesson is repeated. For a child just
starting school it therefore represents as a rule nothing new for his first
arithmetic and writing efforts to be immediately acknowledged in the form of
praise or reproach, i.e., as proof of those virtues such as “learning aptitude”
and “eagerness to learn,” “independent thinking” and “group spirit,” that
developmental psychologists have long since theoretically expounded as natural
determinants of the school-educated mind. For a pupil accustomed to regarding
and exercising his mind not as such but as a test of his special “personality,”
the requirement to hold forth in essays on arbitrary subjects, as untroubled by
any knowledge of them as possible, in such a way as to declare one’s own
personal sympathy for or aversion to them with a successful semblance of
reasoning — this requirement poses no intellectual problem, but solely this
problem of proving himself. Raising up the gradually maturing personality to
“share responsibility in shaping” school life complements an education of heart
and mind that makes it a habit of mind to ferret out in every topic presented
an opportunity to demonstrate a critical ability, sense of responsibility
and independence, that is, to practice knowledge as a matter of intellectual
hypocrisy. The subsumption of learning under the rules of the art of
entering into an important relationship with the objects of learning —
enforced at school under the pressure of grading by ever so understanding
teachers — is given some refinement by the ideas of communication science,
which, in its thinking and argumentation, right from the start excludes the
matter under discussion and the effort of comprehending and explaining, taking
the mere fact that language occurs and communication happens as the occasion to
declare all sorts of partnership-based virtues of tearing into each other to be
the “actual” matter at hand — so that in the end one can even abstract
lightheartedly from the facts of speaking itself. Translated into action, this
madness leads to all sorts of successful techniques for accustoming both young
and old to the illusion of being called upon to take responsibility for the way
things go, without the slightest detour via the semblance of an intellectual
examination of the world. Free and easy, the individual “experiences” himself
in role play as potential capitalist, unemployed person or head of
government, thereby attaining in any case one thing: the standpoint of a
profound understanding for the world whose prime mover he pretends to be. And
what’s good for the flower children with their kindergarten notions has long
since been good for today’s university students.
Notes
1
Cf. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization.
2
Cf. The Democratic State: Critique of Bourgeois Sovereignty.
3
Cf. Lenin’s What is to be done? in which he outlines
the tasks of the workers’ movement and the revolutionary party.
© GegenStandpunkt 2007