Communism
as Follow-up Care
– a 200-year-old idea in the wake of October 12 –
Utopian
Anachronicle (Утопическая Анахроника, Utópista Anakrónika),
Avantgrad,
February 2048
Proletarians
of the World! World citizens! Most Honorable Animals, Vegetables, and
Minerals!
Dear Entities and their Representatives! Dear Dolphins! O Gentle
Browsers! My
Friends! February 2048 has greeted us with dazzling sunshine, and the
strawberries of the city of
It has
been going this way for over eight years now, and still, each time it
happens,
we are surprised over and over. Whenever we try to say something or put
words
on paper, as we begin some inscrutable force suddenly puts the brakes
on our
tongue, interrupting the thought we have begun. Our voice falters; we
resign
ourselves to this. Something that had seemed so important just a moment
ago is
no longer so. Just now, you see, it was enough for me to say “blood and
revolution” – and…
Oh! …I said it again, and again my voice
faltered. That is how it goes. Ever since 10/12, we have been unable to
compose
our words as we once did. The Shock that hit humanity on October 12,
2039
impedes us to this very day - not just in our opening sentences, but
also in what
we read. This puts (for example) Abraham Singh Tao’s essential work The
Rise, Fall, and Rerise of the Idea of Communism in a new light. I
picked up
this book in order to revive memories of the events of 200 years ago,
in
February 1848, when the Communist Manifesto was published in German,
and the
Revolution broke out in
In 1848,
words were passionate and knives were sharp.
Petőfi, the poet of sacred universal freedom, sang out “Hang the
kings!” while
Marx and Engels – like Petőfi, and with just as little real thirst for
blood,
certainly less than was the fashion of their time – inserted at the end
of
their Manifesto three (the sixth, the fifth and the fourth, counting
backwards
from the end ) ominous, instigating phrases: “The Communists disdain to
conceal
their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be
attained only
by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the
ruling
classes tremble at a Communist revolution.”
The
author-pair Marx-Engels endeavoured later, but to no end; no use that
they
refrained from inciting to violence, as still the three ominous
sentences
compromised, so long and so gravely, not only the Communists in general
but
particularly those living under "real" communism who simply wanted to
approach the “original” Marx. These three sentences, for
all
intents and purposes, ruined the reputation of Communism from February
1848 all
the way up to the mid-2010s. They became the Makarenko strike of
Communism: the
more you tried, the harder it became to cast them off (we have only to
remember
the debates of the 2010s).
The
Communists (Makarenko the pedagogue, and Marx the philosopher of
practice,
among others) proclaimed - in vain - that it was not enough for
education and
politics to be free of violence; they must be anti-violence; in vain,
because
in reality – not only that of the Communists – the strikes,
revolutions,
altercations, animosities, hostilities, religious wars, civil wars,
proletarian
wars, ethnic, economic, media and football wars, in short, bellum
omnium
contra omnes, and the general warlike frenzy that accompanied it
conquered
the souls of people, whose egoistic hubris was outweighed only by their
fanaticism and aggression. The milk factory workers blew up the
bittersweet
chocolate factories just as naturally as the pork-breeders poisoned the
stock
of cattle; the greatest devastation, however, with increasing levels of
assault
that spread throughout the world, was carried out by ad hoc murderers,
spontaneous assassins, aleatory terrorists and empirical nihilists, who
incidentally, but with increasing frequency and on an increasingly
larger
scale, destroyed icons, peoples, animals, agricultural land, power
plants,
settlements, churches and other holy places, media satellites,
info-stations,
or just happened to come upon copies of the two-hundred year-old
Communist
Manifesto burned at the stake.
The
special thing about the book I hold in my hand is that it was published
mere
days before the Global Shock. Its author, Abraham Singh Tao, the
eco-menical idea-conomist of
Satarov-Beach-upon-Volga (who like 400 million of his fellow men
perished of a
heart attack during the World Shock) attained
such implications through his serious theoretical work that - the fruit
of his
long studies - he pronounced or wrote down sentences so full of
meaning,
sentences that we who have recovered after 10/12 utter with no
difficulty
whatsoever, sometimes several times a day, such as: “Hello, where are
you
going?” or “Let’s take a stroll through the teagardens, and discuss the
transpersonal question of vital importance that we mentioned last time
at the
coffee plantation”, or “The building blocks for tomorrow have
been here
for a long time, but the stonemasons who will build from them are still
not
free enough”, or “There is plenty of money around today; it is just
that desire
is not aroused through desirable channels”, or even “Even if there is
goodwill,
inclination for activity, and money, it is all for nothing if they
cannot find
their way to each other”.
Abraham
Singh Tao belonged to the ranks of those globally organised
conservative
Communists who undertake the legal and political representation and
attend to
the needs of those individuals, peoples, animal species or even
dialects that
are unwilling or unable to articulate themselves; they are concerned
first and
foremost with the resurrection of languages dead or threatened with
extinction,
defunct customs and crafts, and forgotten folksongs, the recloning of
extinct
species, and the reconstitution of lost values. The demand for
reconstruction
emerged first in philosophy (and only later followed such practical
initiatives
as, for example, the celebrated ultimatum (originally in reference to
Hegel)
that if the philosopher doing a handstand would prefer his head not to
be so
red, he should stand on his feet as soon as possible).
In the
period before the Shock, the influence of futurist Communism exerted
considerable influence alongside conservative Communism. Its followers
self-consciously proclaimed: “I will do everything possible,
climatically
speaking, to keep my descendants from having to live in a cauldron!”
The
futurist Communists lived in continual self-restraint: they generally
fasted,
and travelled on foot, by bicycle, rowboat and sailboat, spent a lot of
time in
the forest, and planted trees. They occasionally used electric
vehicles, and
harnessed current from the Sun, the wind, lightning and earthquakes.
The
futurist Communists would also lose their chains – but not their famed
body-building-salon chains, a rightful source of pride. This was
a
network of workout rooms where every newton of extracted human force
was
transformed into electric power and stored. Nevertheless all of this,
and much
more, was to be in vain. Events so accelerated that, at a certain
point, the
global violence and fanatic frenzy became irreversible, only increasing
all the
way up to “the great world seizure” (le grand mal global), as
the event
called the Global Shock ("Shock" for short in the new school
textbooks) was called, by post-psychiatritsts, after the epileptic grand mal .
But even for Communists
living such refined modes of existence, it was only the aftermath of
the Shock
of ’39 that brought the prospect of resolving the tension between the
civil
revolutionary demand for freedom and the raw Communist claim for
equality - and
this ultimately not by the abstract call for fraternity, but through
the
everyday practice of real brotherhood: the
recognition that all souls on this planet
are brothers, that I have not one, three or nine siblings, but nine
(though by
now only three) billion. Of course, the discovery that we are all
brothers is
nothing new; Jesus taught this two thousand years ago, and Marx two
hundred;
but the Communist experiments before the Shock – in
Everyone knew the end of the world was near, confirmed by the formidable gravitating force of its acceleration: out of nine billion people, more than six billion ran amok, rushing their own way without consideration for anyone else. As they reached a level of collective frenzy, the individuals caught up in the storm felt this to be a sign of the Apocalypse, and their salvation; in fact, though, they were either killing or dying. On 12 October 2039, many religious Jews finally put this down to the appearance of the Messiah, while Christian congregations said it was the second coming of Jesus Christ, rejoicing at the Parousia; the Shiites saw the hidden Mahdi make his appearance; the Hindus saw Hindu justice and the Muslims its Islamic counterpart; the Hungarians felt once again obedient to the God of the Hungarians; and General Ramakrishna and General Mahmud pressed the button to launch the atom bomb, believing that the other would not do so. Finally, of course, the Communist program also seemed to come to fruition, as each put something on the table of humanity according to his abilities, and took from it according to his needs . Each according to his own beliefs.
That was all
they could do, because smack in the middle of the
Global Grand
Mal, either God or Nature (deus sive natura) reached into
the brain
of frenzied humanity like some kind of alien cosmic
doctor - into the center of the globe, of
the epileptic seizure of all people and other forms of intelligence -
and
excised the better part of the masculine-combative-competitive
ganglions. As a
result, those global nerves inclined toward cooperation, patience and
care
remained undisturbed; it is no accident that the role of women and
dolphins in
the management of world conflicts has grown spectacularly over the past
eight
years, at the expense of males. Of course we have also known for a long
time
what three Nobel Prize-winning economists have also proven, that the
cooperative approach, not the competitive one, is advantageous for
economic
achievement.
The
defective strategies of wounded egos are now nowhere to be found; it
seems that
the Shock obliterated the Bad. True, it did not accomplish the Good, at
best
sparing something of it. No gratitude, just dull pleasure: the obtuse
happiness
of survival. The Shock did not realise the desires and demands of many
millions. Instead, they extinguished each other – and the lives of six
billion
people.
The
Global Cataclysm engendered (wonder of
wonders!) a moral revolution that took place
organically and calmly; quality turned into into quantity and vice
versa. The
torrent of common traumatic experience changed the mentality of us all.
What
now could be more natural than considering primarily not our own
raptures and
roots, but the welfare and future of our fellows? Knowledge is public
and shared,
and riches are public property. We might call this Communism. We might
also say
that our life is like
translated
by Adele Eisenstein
final
English version by Jim Tucker
(Published
in A Terv/Die Planung/The Planning, no.
247. June-July, 2048)
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