Painting by Odilon Redon
*
Sometimes misunderstanding is proactive understanding. I do not understand something as it merely already is, but as I can remake it, even if only in my mind.
*
The horizon of Heidegger’s conception of being ends at mere unveiling. Being, however, is never merely revealed, but always also acted upon and transformed, terraformed—that is why we need Marx. One cannot even merely unveil. Being itself, the topography of our “being-in-the-world”, is terraformed through labor, and not only beings.
*
People tend to think of science as something “concrete” and “empirical”, but it is predominantly abstract. The empirical is employed in science, but is still peripheral to its abstract essence. Even if we conceive of science in terms that prioritize technology, it is nevertheless plainly manifest that the “first technology”, as it were, is our abstractive capacity, an instance of which is the problematized consciousness which renders things “present-at-hand” for us, which abstracts them from a total subsumption in their integral being-in-the-world.
This is the inverse of “gnosis” wherein the concrete and empirical is the essential (provided we transpose the sense of “empirical” into the experience of “higher realities”, or “gnosense”, and we understand “concretion” in the sense of “metaphysical concretion” or “intelligible immediacy”), and the abstract is peripheral (the post facto reflection of that experience in theoretical language).
*
Philosophical problems can often be dissolved through sufficient clarity about the language which produces them—but the point is not to dissolve them, the point is to weaponize them! Science is weaponized and directed stupidity.
*
Dialectic is a conceptual mimesis, an imitation of concretion by concepts, and of concepts by other concepts. The imitation of concepts by other concepts is often, itself, an imitation of concretion.
*
The circle of history encompasses imagination. Sometimes, time rolls back to that which was only imagined before.
*
Description is the ultimate degree of prescription.
To describe in this way or in that way is to condition the range of actions perceived as possible, and to intimate that only certain actions are advisable, and so on.
The imperative value of Heidegger’s phenomenology lies in the above fact. There is a political program implicit in his understanding of Dasein.
In this sense, God, as the “highest metaphysical degree of reality” is that which is all (descriptively), and therefore that which prescribes all. God is the power of accomplishing all things (omnipotence), the Promethean fire, stolen from heaven and brought down to earth. The instantaneity of omnipotence in heaven, when transposed to earthly temporality becomes a drawn out process of development, i.e. “progress”. Or, rather, transcendentally, it is “progress”, and transcendently it is ritual, “iconoesis”, traditional ascesis.
*
Structure of eternity: eternity, when its timeless presentation is re-presented as a structure, becomes the intersection of always was, always will be, always is, and always could be. This structure is “eternity” in its indefinite sense.
*
In Keith Johnstone’s “Impro” we can see an instance of mimetic technology directed at the modification of Dasein’s factical ground. The means of modifying the inexplicit ground that conditions our being-in-the-world belongs to various mimetic artifices and techniques. The crucial insight here is that it can be done, and that the means for effecting such a change can be considered broadly “technical”, scientific.
Theater is the science of modifying being (in the sense of Dasein).
This is expanded on a social and historical scale through attention directed at the means of production. These, too, are inexplicit, at least at the present time, an inexplicitness that we call “alienation”, an obscured background that conditions us in advance. That is why the mere appearances of our social form must be penetrated scientifically, as Marx does in the opening section of Capital. It is not primarily at the explicit level of “liberal democracy” that we are dominated, but at the relatively inexplicit level of “bourgeois dictatorship”, with all that pertains to this on the level of productive and distributive arrangements. Class consciousness and social revolution, therefore, modify the very contours of our being-in-the-world. The same discomfort that attends the practice of theater, as detailed by Johnstone, attend the consciousness of class relations. We dissolve the fetish of explicit appearance, and look behind the curtain of social taboo, at the nakedness of being.
*
How can hermeneutic be closed in a circle when its namesake, Hermes, is the one who transgresses the fixed boundaries of the Moirai? Hermeneutic transgresses its own circle. The “circle” is a practical joke, and those who sincerely believe in it are worthy of laughter.
*
Mimesis is, as it were, the primary “mechanism” of the defiance of the principle of non-contradiction—that is, it is the way in which the identity and non-identity of a thing to itself is practically realized in the world.
*
Qualities do not require explanation, they require intellection. The principle of sufficient reason runs around the outside edge of quality. This circumscription of qualitative concretion is certainly a useful and scientific procedure, but that intellection which plumbs into the depths of qualitative immediacy is just as scientific, even if it is science of a different kind. Intellection has its own rigors.
*
Every traditional metaphysic, insofar as it is truly synthetic, accounts for everything, but it does not account for all things on their own terms. That is why a perspectivist metaphysics is necessary. Vedanta accounts for worldly phenomena as “maya”; that is, ultimately, it dismisses them. It does not confront the worldly on its own terms, but it does confront it. It does not account for it on its own terms, but it does account for it.
*
In the same way that technology (or technoscience) outpaces theoretical science, the nous, as a faculty, or the experience and use of noesis, outpaces all theological, metaphysical, and philosophical doctrines. Thus, the gnostic is the technoscientist of the spirit, the one who prioritizes the act of noesis over the doctrines which it produces.
*
Gnosticism is the generic form of ontopolitan (Promethean socialist) religiosity. Why? Because the gnostic (from gnosis) directly engages with being without the intermediation of religious dogma (cosmopolitan religiosity), nor is it restricted by the “authenticity” of local custom (first ontopolitanism), though it is by no means opposed to the latter—on the contrary, it can adapt itself to locality quite easily (though it can just as easily scandalize it). The second ontopolitanism possesses more plasticity than the all-too-plastic cosmopolitanism. This is precisely because being is the emptiest concept. Nothing is more plastic than Nothing.
One can contrast the gnostic's noesis free from dogma, to the pale imitation of the Protestant's discursive hermeneutic of scripture free from dogma.
*
Epistemology is a metaphysics since it deals with the faculties which render physis sensuously intelligible. It takes a meta-physical stance, though in order to do this it must reduce physis into something smaller (or, better yet, flatter) than that physis which we encounter in traditional cosmologies. Thus, epistemology is a kind of metaphysics in the sense of an imitation of metaphysics.
*
Wisdom is a non-discursive rationality. It is the symbol of the scales. It weighs the world in the balance without recourse to quantity; it takes in hand the quality of weightiness in things. It establishes the qualitative ratios between this and that.
*
“If you reject the principle of non-contradiction, you can justify anything!”—yes, but why would you? Furthermore, that I can do this, that I have the power to “justify anything”, is clearly a strength and not a weakness. Just how far I carry that power of justification is left up to my discretion.
*
Hubris is always bound to appear stupid, and perhaps it really is. It always contravenes the bounds of intelligence, the moirai, which are the delimiting factors on what constitutes correctness, what constitutes knowledge. Hubris transgresses knowledge.
*
Abstraction seems to be a type of mimesis. Aristotle’s method of abstracting general principles out of a variety of phenomena is an attempt to mimic those phenomena in thought. That thought has a conceptual, and hence metaphorical character. Abstraction is a type of poetry, perhaps a poetry of environmental mastery, a poetry which grasps things.
If concepts are rooted in metaphor, than conceptual thought is a type of poetry.
*
Reification of concepts is no more an “error” than it is an error that one is able to take a piece of wood and carve it into a spear. Is it an “error” that this spear no longer resembles the original piece of wood? Reification is a power, not an error. Reification facilitates the weaponization and directedness of thought.
*
“Common sense” is most generally an “empathic” overlap of sensation on a wide scale, the community, the nation, the culture, humanity at a large. It is a shared feeling (pathos) about a sensory overlap.
That which is “common sensical” is that which is already accessible to the shared space of common sensation. As things, in time, come to be circumscribed in this space, they become common sensical for us. The thread which circumscribes this space, and knits together its various constituents and regions, is a shared pathos.
*
To reduce things to exchangeable “quantities” (establishing a ratio between them) is not an error on our part, but the exercise of a power. That this exchange value does not “really” abide in things is not to say that it does not abide at all—it abides, first of all in us, as a human capacity.
*
Part of the method in understanding being will have to be by contrast with that which can be substituted with it (primarily, in language). For example, one can say that “this is that”. Being is invoked here. One can also say “this appears as that”. Being has been at least partially removed or displaced, though one could argue it is still implicit here, but that implicitness or sidelining of being is itself a transformation of it and can help us understand being. We see what can happen to being in such substitutions. This will help our understanding.
As usual, any investigation of being is inseparable from an investigation of knowing. The point of an investigation is to know, after all.
*
There are also qualitative magnitudes. Certain experiences are simply vaster than others, even if the magnitude of that vastness cannot be subjected to the same measurements that we apply to ordinary quantitative magnitudes.
*
Dialectic presupposes and is dependent upon the rational. It is a rational technology that requires that several things are susceptible, or made to be susceptible, even quite forcefully, of mutual exchange and standardized comparison. Forcing things into an exchangeable mold is one of the functions of labor, especially in the industrial era. It is a magnificent power.
*
“It cannot be done” is not a scientific claim, but a residue of religious dogma. Science, in its most audaciously modern form, that is, in its most Promethean form, says “it cannot be done yet”.
*
Every mere thing is vanity of vanities, at least once repetition has exhausted it of its novelty and appeal—only hubris is unvanquished, only hubris has inexhaustible appeal, particularly the monumental hubris of the human collective that draws us onto great things. Hubris is a fountain of eternal youth. It transgresses the age-old boundaries of thinghood, and produces their historical rebirth. Even the defeats which hubris suffers are a victory in the long term. Its defeats lead not to annihilation but to the “reduction” into quintessence, concentrated potency.
*
Man is made from clay—the protean element, the element of creative plasticity, but also the element that acquires a brittle rigidity when work upon it is completed.
*
To sin is to “miss the mark”. That is, to veer off the path which has been determined in advance for us. To sin is to transgress the rational net which enmeshes us, a net not of our own making but of our captors’. One can miss the mark by a little, and one can miss the mark by a lot. The maximum of missing the mark is to head in the opposite direction, back toward the point from which that mark was issued—back to the gods. Hence, Babylon (or, rather, the tower of Babel) is the symbol of “sin” par excellence: a united humanity headed backwards, building their tower upwards into the clouds, toward the overthrow of the gods. Hence, Prometheus retrieved fire out of heaven, out of the origins.
*
The space peasant—autochthon of the air, cultivator of the vast field that is empty space, rooted in the rootlessness of infinity.
The parochial looks toward what is near-at-hand. Let us, then, make everything near-at-hand. Let us be on familiar terms with the uncanny reaches of deep space.
*
Those locked away in prison often turn to religion for the same reason that the religious who are outside of prison see life itself as a sort of prison or a tomb—there is nowhere else to turn but within.
*
Only a human being can pretend to be someone that they are not. Among the animals, there are some that can pretend to be something that they are not, but never someone.
*
Empathy is the experimental proof that our interiorities genuinely overlap, regardless of whether science can explain this or not. It is incumbent on science to catch up with the data, not the reverse. The “Other” is refuted day-to-day, a philosopher’s superstition.
*
Many practices that appear temporally new are implicitly ancient—for if they had existed thousands of years ago, they would have been practiced for thousands of years. The traditionalist sometimes rejects what his forebears would have joyfully embraced.
*
The problem with the formula of the eternal recurrence is its individualist character—“what would I do if every choice would recur eternally? How should I act and feel?”. It presupposes a hermetically sealed individual which simply does not exist. The world is full of more worthy problems than individual whimsy.
*
One can draw a distinction between the vital stupidity of Erasmus’ “Folly”, the stupidity of apaedia—the untutored wisdom of Pan—and the stupidity that one is educated into. At present, a certain kind of stupidity is rife, not from lack of education, but from a particular sort of education. People are educated into stupidity.
*
Under the worldview of Greek comedy, the world is empty of essence, and hence provokes laughter and lightness of being. Under the aspect of Greek tragedy, the world is constrained by its own gravity, and every essence presses us like a lead weight. Under the Abrahamic view, the world is an empty affair, “vanity of vanities”, and nevertheless it presses us with the utmost seriousness “unto death”. The opposite poles of comedy and tragedy are conjoined in Abrahamic religiosity, in the stupidest possible way, though “stupidity” in a profound sense. This stupidity is “foolishness to the Greek”, but we are not at all obliged to be Greeks in every instance.
*
Comedy is the audacious proposition that the good things in life are limitless and free, that one can have one’s cake and eat it too. Tragedy is the equally audacious proposition that the restricted and contracted is of vaster scope than the expansive and overflowing.
*
There are some things that seem vast and imposing until you ask “so what?” and they disappear in a puff of smoke. That which is all-surface, “mere appearance”, can be punctured by a well-placed question as with a needle.
*
Creativity is not only inspiration, but expiration and aspiration, as well.
*
a la Johnstone—a story, or narrative, is a sequence of events that has an ending, not merely one that happens to end somewhere. It has it. The ending is peculiar to it, integral to it, it belongs to it, it determines what the narrative is. Hence “re-incorporation”. The narrative structure is the story’s way of growing itself, as opposed to growing something else, of being itself. Without narrative structure (re-incorporation), a story has no being. The being of the story (that it is a story) must be prior to its explicit parts. This is entelecheia, in its original sense. A story, like an organism, can also continue to grow, and live, and re-incorporate, in its continued effort at being itself, generating new endings, or even the same ending, again and again.
*
The master-slave dialectic is a contest over the mastery of space, which, in turn, reveals that underlying the dialectic is a triadic structure: master-slave-space. The third term in this triad defies the principle of non-contradiction by possessing features of both prior terms. Space is the master and slave of all masters and slaves. It is that which they both contest over, seeking the privilege of instrumentalizing and dominating it. At the same time, in their preoccupation with mastery of space they are, in a sense, mastered by it. They need it.
Moral of the story? Become space. Homo faber is both slave and master, and neither slave nor master. Homo Faber is man become Space, a productive space, a space both empty and full—that is, a continual creative filling. In historical terms, homo faber is not just generically and indifferently both master and slave, but specifically the slave become both master and slave.
*
All invention is re-invention, especially the first “invention”, namely, fire, which was the re-invention of what nature had already furnished.
*
A self-defeating philosophy is a tragic philosophy. The point is to defeat yourself in meaningful and interesting ways. There is hardly anything compelling about the philosopher who is the miser of little victories. Such a philosophy does not inspire the imagination.
*
The drama of Prometheus, his theft of heavenly fire, and his subsequent defeat and imprisonment, signifies the pyrrhic victory of metaphysics. Bound in chains in the midst of inhospitable mountains, Olympian metaphysics has rescued itself at the last moment from total disaster, but at a very high cost. The introduction of heavenly fire into the human world, signifies a change in metaphysics as we used to know her, namely as Olympian joviality, comedic gnosis—metaphysics has been rendered tragic. Modernity finds the crucifixion of Christ more compelling, even if only as a drama, than it does the resurrection for precisely this reason. The restoration of comedy after the third day feels like an attempt to roll things back to a state prior to the dreadful march of tragedy up the slopes of Golgotha. That is, again, a modern bias, valuable to us insofar as we are moderns, but it is not the only view.
*
You cannot have a philosophy of transgression without having a philosophy of justice. Mere abundance cannot attain to the ideal of transgression. “Mere abundance”—that is, abundance minus justice, an abundance not vast enough to include justice.
Transgression is the privilege of the just. Prometheus’ theft of fire was transgressive precisely because it was done against the justice of Zeus, but for the sake of another justice.
The paradox of justice: how much justice can one justify? How much is too much justice?
Self-indulgence is not abundance. Justice staves off self-indulgence and, hence, is the condition of authentic abundance. There is also a quintessential abundance, and this requires restriction and a breaking-down. Justice is a type of restricting and constraining, and hence an instrument for reducing a circumstance of abundance to its quintessential form. Justice, in other words, can raise mere-abundance to quintessential abundance.
The proper formula is not justice, or unjustice, or injustice, but overjustice. One must be just—and then some. One must have more than justice; exceeding justice for the sake of a “higher justice”.
*
That the god and the outcast occupy the same position outside the hierarchy is established, but what is it they share experientially? What does it feel like to be a god or an outcast? The feeling is one and the same. The outcast calls it “rock bottom”, a feeling in which nothing matters, and things can only get better. The god calls this transcendence, or ecstasy, a divine superiority to things. They are inverse expressions of total security and ecstatic indifference.
*
There is a general belief “up in the air” that the raison d’etre of political parties is to represent different “views”, that views and opinions are just free floating in the atmosphere, for our arbitrary disposal, and we align with certain political parties based on which of these views we choose to identify with.
Political parties are supposed represent the interests of real existing social constituencies, not free floating opinions. It is within the party apparatus of a social constituency that views are debated, in reference to the very definite field of interests represented by that constituency.
In this respect the United States is a one-party bourgeois dictatorship. Insofar as political parties represent distinct social constituencies, we have a single party, divided in two segments, that represents the bourgeois class, but we have no worker’s party. Working people have no political representation here qua working people.
*
Internationalism is not just a logistical network of interconnected planetary labor, but a monumental cultural project—or, rather, a project both parochial and monumentally cosmopolitan at one and the same time. It is the construction of a global socialist culture which not only does not efface local culture, but positively amplifies it, in the context of a coordinated proletarian project of ontological and terrestrial terraformation. This amplification is also that of quintessential rerduction. That part of our cultural inheritance which defies our new justice must be dissolved into its redeemable core.
*
We are always already non-alienated—the point is to stop pretending that we are. Alienation is nothing other than the belief that we are alienated, and the construction of a social order premised on this belief, that is, alienation is an illusion. The form of our institutions is a kind of “play” premised on this false belief. That is why these institutions are not adequate to the actual form of social re-production. Alienation is a pure formality, an illusion, but an illusion with real claws.
*
Heroism and fame are agonistic expressions of socialism and should be encouraged under a socialist order (“socialist emulation”, “heroism of labor”). “Heroism” is that form of competition in which the social body competes at the task of improving the social body.
*
The possibility of unifying many diverse cultures under a socialist banner without effacing their distinctiveness will depend on the ability to establish analogies between them, and the medium which establishes those analogies must be the specter of communism expressed in symbols. A socialist symbolic tableau, and a sort of “perennial socialist tradition” will be necessary to establish a common language of man. The common tongue of Babel was the tongue of the symbolic.
Socialism protects and promotes distinctive cultures, but not as static entities. It seeks to develop cultures according to their own “internal logic”. In order to do this it must first of all, discover (or construct) this internal logic. This logic (like all logic) is “cosmopolitan” in character, universal (or, more precisely, “general”), translatable, transposable. Generalized logic and universal symbolism are both necessary components in bridging, protecting, and developing distinctive cultures, under a socialist banner. It is because the “real movement of communism” is of historical necessity a planetary phenomenon that we are constrained to develop this perenniality of language and symbol.
*
The Althusserian tendency tries to oppose a structural view of Marxism to a humanist one. Nothing could be more superficial. Structural thought is reason, and reasoning is the human faculty par excellence. Man, etymologically, is mind, mentation. Althusser, like Spinoza (in this case, via the ruthlessly consistent application of the principle of sufficient reason), is an ultra-humanist and crypto-humanist.
*
When things such as violence and cruelty are dismissed as “inhuman”, this is a mere colloquialism. In that sense, we have no objection to it as colloquialism. However, in the strict sense, violence and cruelty are in no way inhuman. William Blake understood this when he said that “cruelty has a human face”. It is, on the contrary, liberal humanitarianism that wields injunctions against cruelty and violence as a cudgel with which to beat the working class, all the while it uses violence with a naked effrontery.
*
The political “realignment” (“the right is the new left”) is the dialectic of opportunism. It is a dialectic which evinces not the “cunning of Reason”, as Hegel would have it, but the “stupidity of Reason”. The Reason which moves this process is a near-sighted one which searches out short-term opportunities for self-advancement. It is a dialectic, a procession of contradictions, but the transformations effected through these contradictions barely scratch the surface of things.
*
Socialism is not the “immanentization” of a divine eschaton, for the simple reason that it is theoretically premised on the superiority of the human to the divine. What could socialism possibly want with a merely divine eschaton. Human history tramples over eschaton.
*
Socialism does not do away with “specialization-as-such”, but with specialization as a limit. It is not the abolition of specialization, but its overcoming (in the sense of “aufhebung”). It goes beyond specialization. One retains a specialization, but is never bound by it. Specialization is not an obstacle to a full, human life, but an integral part of it. The illusory opposition between specialization and “well-roundedness” is overcome. Socialism is not just free time. Socialism is not just labor. Socialism is free time for labor, labor of a historically specificied form, industrial and planetary labor, ultra-scientific labor, which by its nature requires all manner of specialization.
*
Humanism has, from the beginning, been about human power (e.g. the creative power of homo faber). Humanitarianism is about human rights. Rights are restrictions of power. To the extent that provisional restrictions promote an increase in power, as one prunes a tree to promote its vigor and integrity, rights are not incompatible with humanism, but neither are they the limit of humanism. It is, indeed, through the historical struggle for rights that oppressed classes have asserted their power, and yet the real point, after all, even if not obvious from the beginning, was the seizure of power.
*
Trying to ape the Soviet aesthetic out of nostalgia for its “old timey” feel entirely misses the point. The Bolshevik aesthetic was cutting edge for its time, “futuristic”. We, too, need to look toward the future. Communists are exiles from the future. They are the futuristic present. That said, even the past has seeds of the future in it. We can discover the future also through historical study, and find fragments of the future at the site of an archaeological dig.
*
Many people on the left suffer from an inability to make the distinction between center and periphery, to identify central concerns and orient their tactics and activities around that center. For these same people, every little problem becomes its own center, requires full attention and immediate resolution—every little infraction of etiquette, every petty conflict, every mishap. In other words, without a center every molehill becomes a mountain. There is a direct line of descent to this tendency from the de-qualified and indifferent conception of space of Descartes—no point in space can claim qualitative centrality anymore. A distinction between center and periphery is not scientific in the modern sense, but this does not mean that it is not scientific at all. Of course, when we speak of “center” we mean a qualitatively meaningful center, a genuinely intelligible center, not a center defined arbitrarily from within an initially indifferent Cartesian space.
*
Heavy industry is the katechon of the political spectrum. It prevents the hordes of far right reaction (in the strict sense, its “nostalgic” sense, medievalist, feudal) and of far left utopians from flooding into the political sphere in a decisive way. Should de-industrialization ever occur, the game is up, hell will be loosed on the world. Industry preserves capitalism—but it preserves it for communism, as a hen preserves her eggs. It is the task of socialism to hatch the eggs.
*
We must distinguish between general socialist planning, or planning that encompasses the entirety of the economy, on the one hand, and universal economic planning, or the principial element in economic planning (i.e. its metaphysical-symbolic root). The socialist household (oikos; oikonomika) is constructed scientifically, not only according to logistical and naturalistic sciences, but noetic sciences also. The socialist polity is a species of sacred architecture.
*
Under socialism, economy returns to its roots as oikonomika, as household management. The management of the public goods, the shared social household, is undertaken in an ordered way and in a familial way. It is this which signals the “abolition of the family”. The “family unit” is a limit constructed against the emergence of the socialist household, a household on a planetary scale. The “family unit” is already, objectively abolished. It maintains itself as a matter of deliberate, reactionary policy.
*
The class based society of the dictatorship of the proletariat is not something that must “give way” to the classlessness of communist society, but is itself the basis for the emergence of the classlessness of homo faber. The classless specter of homo faber becomes present to us only through the class rule of the proletariat. Thus, the only real classless society is the class society of the proletariat—it makes classlessness present to us historically. There is no classless society as such, or no classless society worth having, under the form of industrial-planetary production except the “actually existing classlessness” or proletarian class rule.
*
The bourgeoisie is the class of ressentiment par excellence. They are the people of Pluto, the underground god of wealth, the people of sulfurous underground moods, of envy and greed. The element of ressentiment is particularly evident in the petty bourgeoisie, and hence among anarchists, the petty bourgeois theory par excellence. The haute bourgeoisie, at least, have a certain progressive element in their character, even if highly distorted. This positive aspect of the haute bourgeoisie, however, is in the manner of accidens, not essence. Flourishing circumstances act as a suppressant on their underground moods—but as any good psychologist knows, that which you repress comes back to haunt you in ever more monstrous forms. This explains the really insidious and monstrous character of these great philanthropists, with their distorted and dystopian visions, their great “projects” by which they seek to benefit humanity.
The ressentiment of the petty bourgeois, at least, is relatively unrepressed. It reveals itself frequently, among older age groups generally in political reaction, and in the younger group in left-adventurism, anarchists and the like. The steam valve is loosened relatively frequently (though this is far from making it less dangerous). Still, their hostility is straightforward and comprehensible. It is direct and violent. From the Ku Klux Klan to “anarkiddies”, we all speak and understand the proto-language of interpersonal violence. The hostility of the haute bourgeoisie often surpasses comprehension. In its most direct expressions one, too, sees “straightforward violence”—but on what a scale! Unimaginable orgies of death, the machinery of war—petty bourgeois conflict is, at least, still human conflict—bourgeois violence is as cold as it is monumental. The indirect byways of haute bourgeois hostility are more cryptic—“projects”, “funds”, “charities”, “research institutes”, “grants”, a thousand headed chimera that speaks only in riddles. With bombs they decimate and with their “funds” and “foundations” they quietly strangle us to death.
The worker, being the productive class is not in essence defined negatively (hence, not primarily by ressentiment, which is reactive), but positively. The working class is the class of production, of creativity. Their task is to build, to form a world, to invent, to strive. The working class is the social analogue of “homo faber”, man as master of his own destiny. The negativity of the working class is the accidens by which it brings to fruition the already existing and positive industrial-planetary reality.