The Whither Buro

The State, its laws, its arrangements, constitute the rights of its members; its natural features, its mountains, air, and waters, are their country, their fatherland, their outward material property; the history of this State, their deeds; what their ancestors have produced, belongs to them and lives in their memory. All is their possession, just as they are possessed by it; for it constitutes their existence, their being.

Everyone who at the present time opts for communism is therefore obliged to bear the same individual responsibility for each and every human being who dies for him in the struggle, as if he himself had killed them all. But all those who ally themselves to the other side, the defence of capitalism, must bear the same individual responsibility for the destruction entailed in the new imperialist revanchist wars which are surely imminent, and for the future oppression of the nationalities and classes. From the ethical point of view, no one can escape responsibility with the excuse that he is only an individual, on whom the fate of the world does not depend. Not only can this not be known objectively for certain, because it is always possible that it will depend precisely on the individual, but this kind of thinking is also made impossible by the very essence of ethics, by conscience and the sense of responsibility. He whose decision does not arise from such considerations — no matter how highly developed a creature he may otherwise be exists in ethical terms at a primitive, unconscious, instinctual level.

It should be clear that one cannot read Nietzsche in a haphazard way that each one of his writings has its own character and limits; and that the most important works and labors of his thought, which are contained in his posthumous writings, make demands to which we are not equal. It is advisable, therefore, that you postpone reading Nietzsche for the time being, and first study Aristotle for ten to fifteen years.

Because we live in a bourgeois world and are bound by a thousand threads to bourgeois concepts, language which is “within the confines of capitalist understanding” is easy for the simple-minded to grasp. That is why pseudo-Marxism always “seems to make sense.”

The perfect harmony of man with himself, and that this may be practicable, the harmony of all external things with his necessary practical ideas of them, the ideas which determine what these things should be; this is the ultimate and highest purpose of human existence. This harmony is, to use the language of the critical philosophy, the Highest Good; which Highest Good, considered absolutely, as follows from what we have already said, has no parts, but is perfectly simple and indivisible, it is the complete harmony of a rational being with himself. But in reference to a rational being who is dependent on external things, it may be considered two-fold; as the harmony of the Will with the idea of an Eternal Will, or, moral goodness; and as the harmony of external things with our Will (our rational will, of course), or happiness. It is thus, let it be remembered in passing, so far from being true that man is determined to moral goodness by the desire for happiness, that the idea of happiness itself and the desire for it, rather arise in the first place out of the moral nature of man. Not, That which produces happiness is good;—but, That only which is good produces happiness. Without morality happiness is impossible. Agreeable sensations may indeed exist without it, or even in opposition to it, and in the proper place we shall see why this is the case; but these are not happiness: frequently they are much opposed to it. To subject all irrational nature to himself, to rule over it unreservedly and according to his own laws, is the ultimate end of man; which ultimate end is perfectly unattainable, and must continue to be so, unless he were to cease to be man, and become God. It is a part of the idea of man that his ultimate end must be unattainable; the way to it endless. Hence it is not the vocation of man to attain this end. But he may and should constantly approach nearer to it; and thus the unceasing approximation to this end is his true vocation as man; i.e. as a rational but finite, as a sensuous but free being. If, as we are surely entitled to do, we call this complete harmony with one’s self perfection, in the highest meaning of the word; then perfection is the highest unattainable end of man, whilst eternal perfecting is his vocation. He exists, that he may become ever morally better himself, and make all around him physically, and, if he be considered as a member of society, morally better also, and thus augment his own happiness without limit.

Based Antifascist Kant

The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general. This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation. So much does the labor’s realization appear as loss of realization that the worker loses realization to the point of starving to death. So much does objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is robbed of the objects most necessary not only for his life but for his work. Indeed, labor itself becomes an object which he can obtain only with the greatest effort and with the most irregular interruptions. So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the less he can possess and the more he falls under the sway of his product, capital. ll these consequences are implied in the statement that the worker is related to the product of labor as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the more the worker lacks objects. Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.

All our life passes in this way: we seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces. We must then get away from it and crave excitement.

Trust in the eternal laws of the Gods is silenced, just as the oracles are dumb, who pretended to know what to do in particular cases. The statues set up are now corpses in stone whence the animating soul has flown, while the hymns of praise are words from which all belief has gone. The tables of the gods are bereft of spiritual food and drink, and from his games and festivals man no more receives the joyful sense of his unity with the divine Being. The works of the muse lack the force and energy of the spirit which derived the certainty and assurance of itself just from the crushing ruin of gods and men.

During the June days all classes and parties had united in the party of Order against the proletarian class as the party of anarchy, of socialism, of communism. They had “saved” society from “the enemies of society.” They had given out the watchwords of the old society, “property, family, religion, order,” to their army as passwords and had proclaimed to the counterrevolutionary crusaders: “In this sign thou shalt conquer!” From that moment, as soon as one of the numerous parties which gathered under this sign against the June insurgents seeks to hold the revolutionary battlefield in its own class interest, it goes down before the cry: “property, family, religion, order.” Society is saved just as often as the circle of its rulers contracts, as a more exclusive interest is maintained against a wider one. Every demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the most shallow democracy, is simultaneously castigated as an “attempt on society” and stigmatized as “socialism.” And finally the high priests of “religion and order” themselves are driven with kicks from their Pythian tripods, hauled out of their beds in the darkness of night, put in prison vans, thrown into dungeons or sent into exile; their temple is razed to the ground, their mouths are sealed, their pens broken, their law torn to pieces in the name of religion, of property, of the family, of order. Bourgeois fanatics for order are shot down on their balconies by mobs of drunken soldiers, their domestic sanctuaries profaned, their houses bombarded for amusement – in the name of property, of the family, of religion, and of order.

Contradictions. A good portrait can only be made by reconciling all our contradictory features, and it is not enough to follow through a series of mutually compatible qualities without reconciling their opposites; to understand an author's meaning all contradictory passages must be reconciled.    Thus to understand Scripture a meaning must be found which reconciles all contradictory passages; it is not enough to have one that fits a number of compatible passages, but one which reconciles even contradictory ones.    Every author has a meaning which reconciles all contradictory passages, or else he has no meaning at all, and that cannot be said of Scripture and the prophets; they were certainly too sensible. We must therefore look for a meaning which reconciles all contradictions. […]    If we take the law, the sacrifices, and the kingdom for realities, these passages cannot all be reconciled; it necessarily follows that they are only figurative. It would not even be possible to reconcile passages by the same author, in the same book, sometimes in the same chapter, which makes it only too clear what the author intended; as when Ezekiel, xx, says that man shall live by the commandments of God and that he shall not live by them.

[Historical works of art] are themselves now just what they are for us — beautiful fruit broken off the tree; a kindly fate has passed on those works to us, as a maiden might offer such fruit off a tree. Their actual life as they exist is no longer there, not the tree that bore them, not the earth, and the elements, which constituted their substance, nor the climate that determined their constitutive character, nor the change of seasons which controlled the process of their growth. So too it is not their living world that Fate preserves and gives us with those works of ancient art, not the spring and summer of that ethical life in which they bloomed and ripened, but the veiled remembrance alone of all this reality.

Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the “poor whites” to the Negroes in the former slave states of the U.S.A.. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland.

[In the vulgar Marxist] view, the economic basis of Society, or the forces of production and the' economic structure, constitutes an infra-structure, while the super-structures are the product of objective developments in the economic basis. There is more or less explicit recognition of the reaction of the secondary structures upon their foundation, but the part played in the social dialectic by the rise of consciousness, which we consider essential, is not sufficiently understood. Ultimately, on this view one can hardly avoid interpreting dialectical materialism-an expression of Marx and Engels which seems to us quite obscure and in a sense even self-contradictory-on the model of an unqualified materialism or scientific objectivism. But Marx would have regarded such an objectivist interpretation as one of the most extreme forms of the alienation of man as a living and active being. In our own opinion, the current debate over Marx's conception of materialism would be clarified if one were to return to the philosophical writings prior to the Communist Manifesto and Capital. Indeed, it might be granted-and this is the alternative approach to Marx-that he cannot be understood unless one starts from his philosophical works. In particular, to read Capital, without previously having read the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right and the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, indeed, without having read through Hegel's Phenomenology, inevitably leads to a series of misinterpretations. Neither the economist who ignores the dialectic of alienation, developed by Hegel and Feuerbach, nor the philosopher who overlooks the economic studies of Engels, which had such considerable influence on Marx, can understand either the dynamic or the dialectic which is the heart of Capital or the notion of value as socially necessary work which can have no meaning for either the economist or philosopher who remains within the limits of his discipline.