The integral polity of the “integralists” is founded on a pseudo-integrality, an “integral ideal” rather than an actually attainable integrality. It is based on the naive supposition that one can simply sweep class antagonisms under the rug. A real integral polity must leverage class antagonisms towards the production of integral unity—but, is this not a contradiction? Is this not absurd? Can one really say “antagonism” and “integrality” in the same breath?
The final and total abolition of the bourgeois class is neither possible as an actuality nor advisable as a policy, under the presently prevailing mode of production. True, the bourgeois class as a tangibly manifested relation in the production process, a relation invested in certain actually existing human persons, can be eliminated through political means, through sheer violence united to formal decree. Yet, the bourgeois class is the most abstract of classes. If you eliminate him in his tangible human presence (to the extent that he even really is human), he will nevertheless persist as abstraction—as bourgeois class tendency. Just as the specter of communism haunts us now, so will the specter of the dead capitalist haunt us in spite of his fleshly absence. Both the bourgeois class and the proletarian class came to birth, as we know them, through the selfsame industrial and socialized mode of production. The worker represents the most tangible and rooted contact with this mode of production, and the bourgeois class represents an abstraction from out of this process—but such ab-stracting, such a ghostly drawing-from-out-of, is always, in principle, a possibility. As long as the material base out of which this ab-straction was accomplished persists, that class which is abstractable from out of it will always be present, even if only as implicit possibility. And this implicit possibility, it bears mentioning, is itself not only an abstraction, not merely the abstraction of an already abstract class. This “implicit possibility” of the bourgeois class manifests in a real way, manifests as reactionary tendencies, as bureaucratic corruption, bribery, the reassertion of selfish and narrow interests. The more one effaces the bourgeois class, the more ghostly one renders this most abstract of all classes, the more real of a presence he acquires, the presence of a real haunting. Therefore, the key to a successful working class strategy is to prevent the bourgeois class from acquiring an implicit and clandestine character. How? By keeping them out in the open, thereby rendering them accountable, our instruments of productivity through prosperity, and our scapegoats in adversity. That is, the most advantageous position that the working class can hold vis a vis the bourgeois class is to hold them permanently hostage. Real power directed at real and easily locatable enemies is the best guarantee of good behavior on their part. It is much easier to make a man behave than a ghost. Put another way—if we want to master the bourgeois tendency itself, the tendency toward ab-stracting from out of the socialized production process, with all its attendant consequences, we would be better served by concentrating that tendency in a limited and easily identifiable selection of real persons, rather than by distributing it among countless individual bureaucrats and the like. Practically speaking, such a measure can be accomplished by maintaining a limited market sector subject to the authority of working class political rule as is currently done in China, for example. Therefore, for the success of revolutionary socialism, an indispensable principle emerges—“keep your friends close, but your enemies closer”.
The chief distinction between “integralism”, in the ordinary sense, and the actual integral polity, as only revolutionary socialism is able to conceive it, is that the pseudo-polity of “integral-ism” is established “from the outside”—by whom? Presumably by “God” himself, through the authority entrusted to his vicars on earth, whether in the form of an ecclesiastical body or of a “national idea” to which all are expected to submit. This polity of integralism is always a pseudo-polity due to the inevitable disconnect between the integral order which it attempts to establish on paper, and what can actually be achieved in reality, what the limitations of the prevailing mode of production impose upon its idealistic aspirations. The only real possible outcome of such a political program is a bourgeois dictatorship with an “integral aesthetic”. Capitalism is the flaming sword at the gate of paradise (and, what is paradise but the supreme symbol of integral unity?). Any real integration in the social order is forclosed as long as bourgeois dictatorship persists, and bourgeois dictatorship cannot be abolished through a mere “national idea” or through Church dogma.
As capitalism proceeds and develops, and, consequently, as the contradiction between its private mode of appropriation and its socialized mode of production intensifies, it experiences a growing crisis in its inability to integrate vaster and vaster swathes of humanity into its feeble system—feeble, not in the power of its productive forces, but its inablity to master them; feeble, not in its increasing socialization, but in its inability to “digest” this new social reality, to make sense of it, to adjust itself to a “new humanity”, an already-existing “new humanity”; not the mere ideal of a “new man”, but a new man who is already here, a new social being whose dimensions already exceed the limits of what capitalism considers comprehensible. Capitalism, in other words, disintegrates—it becomes dis-integrative, a force running counter to integration. The formal aspect of its organization cannot keep pace with, cannot integrate, the real-existing social state of affairs. In this respect, what is it that socialism offers? It does not offer a fully and finally integrated world, a world which is always-already-integrated, a world where “alienation” is definitively overcome for all time. What it does offer is a much greater power of integration, a much more pronounced capacity for keeping pace with the unceasing flux of the social world (and, of the world of nature, generally). Socialism is not so much an “integral worldview” or “integral social system”, but a greater power of integration, which itself implies a continual task, an unceasing demand imposed by a world always in motion, a world that does not slow down for us. It is incumbent upon us to employ all of our forces toward the task of, not only catching up with the world, but outpacing it—that is, the task of a real dialectical give and take with the world. Capitalism can only take from the world, until finally it runs dry. It is far too slow to also give back to it.
This integrative power of socialism refers not only to the real historical movement of social reorganization taking place in “material reality”, but to socialism's various ideological iterations, its expanding and ever changing network of concepts, the historical development and refinement of its “ideological apparatus” (e.g. Marxism at the time of the first International, Marxism-Leninism in the age of imperialism, Maoism, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, etc). This ideological component of socialism (which is not dogmatic and fixed) also possesses a greater integrative power with relation to the contemporary situation in thought. In other words, the development of socialist theory takes upon itself the task of organizing the world of philosophy and ideology, as it is actually present in the contemporary world of thinking persons and academics, in the same way that socialism in production takes upon itself the task of reorganizing contemporary economic and political realities. The socialist intellectual is tasked with a struggle against the prevailing anarchy in thought, against the dis-integrative manner of thinking nurtured by capitalism. Thought and material reality move in tandem, overlap like the Gordian knot, beyond unraveling, and socialism must keep pace on both fronts.
Revolutionary socialism, therefore, is the science of real integration, and to apply this science we must know its mathematical formula, its “E equals MC squared”. This formula, which is a paradox, is as follows: “Integration requires power, and power requires tension, and tension requires polarity, and polarity implies a never completed integration”. Integration, in other words, demands that we never really integrate, that we nurture the forces of polarity and tension, those forces which stand opposed to integration. Let us, step by step, attempt an exegesis of this paradoxical formula. “Integration requires power”—in order to inaugurate and preside over a process of integration we must have power at our disposal sufficient to do so. Anarchic processes will not surrender themselves without a fight. They must be mastered by force and by judicious application of “scientific method”. Where does power come from? It comes from tension. Power is the alternating tensing and releasing of force in a directed way. The secret to the success of socialist integration, therefore, is the maintenance of such tensions on a fundamental social level, that is, the maintenance of antagonistic social classes—and, does this not imply a fundamentally non-integrated order, a dis-integrative order? How can one maintain social integrality and maintain such class-based tensions? The only way to resolve this paradox is to bear in mind that socialism is the real-existing historical process of increasing integrative power, and not a finally integrated social system, not a fixed state of affairs. Such tension is, indeed, also in contradiction with integrative power, but, in this case, the contradiction is a fruitful and productive one, a contradiction which has an amplificatory effect, a contradiction which promotes that which it opposes. Social tension, which is the “opposite” of integration—promotes integration! This is the purport of the above formula, “Integration requires power, and power requires tension, and tension requires polarity, and polarity implies a never completed integration”. Tension amplifies our power of integration at the same time that is forecloses the possibility of an already-completed integration. Are we therefore to attempt, like madmen, to abolish tension itself? But, tension is not a purely human fabrication. Tension, is, in any case, always present in the world, a world which is always in motion, a world considered dialetically. The task, on the one hand, is to leverage that tension, and, just as crucially, to answer the question of who it is that will leverage it.
Says Lenin: “...the chief organizing force of anarchically built capitalist society is the spontaneously growing and expanding national and international market”. Note—the growing of the market, not of the productive forces. Market, under capitalism, is essence, and productive power is accidens. The task of the dictatorship of the proletariat, from the standpoint of the preceding considerations, and what has been considered elsewhere, is not to entirely abolish market, but to reverse the polarity between market and social productivity, between bourgeois and worker, between state and society, etc. In other words, the task of the dictatorship of the proletariat is to turn the world right-side-up. Note, also, that the linchpin of the critique of capitalism, in the above passage from Lenin, is that it is anarchic—in other words, it lacks an integrally and essentially political character. Capitalism is not even a polity. It does not possess the modicum of integral unity necessary to be designated as a polity. Socialism is a restoration of politics in the classical sense, the life of the genuine polity, by reuniting real power and formal power—both in the sense of formal institutions and of formative influence, of having the forces which can modify the form of the polity at one's disposal. Real power is in the hands (in the most tangible sense) of the workers, and, under the present mode of production, cannot be otherwise. Therefore, in order to establish an integral polity in the revolutionary socialist sense, a polity in which integrative power is wielded most effectively, formal-institutional power must also be theirs. Socialism is not only the only real humanism and the only real archaeofuturism, it is also the only real “integralism”.