The struggle against reduction of the amplitude of the revolution is already a revolutionary struggle. The reader should not be astonished if to support this amplitude we refer to authors classically tagged religious, mystical, etc. What matters is the reappropriation of Gemeinwesen (and past beings are part of it), which can only be done after the unification of the species, and this unification can only be conceived by grasping the aspiration, desire, passion and will for community expressed through the ages. The human being can simultaneously be a Gemeinwesen only if humanity lives in community. As soon as fragmentation appears, the need to recompose a unity emerges.
The Wandering of Humanity
From Dummkopf Dupont:
ReplyDelete‘Two white harts are before us: Gemeinschaft/Gemeinwesen and Gesellschaft. Our deep desire is to live in Gemeinschaft/Gemeinwesen because we understand how Gesellschaft produces, to reverse Hobbes, a war of each against all. This desire is reasonable, of course. But the project of its implementation has led to misery and murder and, even more shockingly, as you note and as evidenced by the whimsies of the ultra-left and the rest of the far left and anarchist cohort, the strengthening of the superstructure of alienated and alienating Gesellschaft. The problem might be that the human community is a myth both in its possible form as an originary grouping of human beings, and as a projected communism. This possible myth was perhaps formulated, subconsciously of course, as one of the pillars of deceit that - maybe deceit is too strong a word? - prop up the shaky Enlightenment we seem to have inherited. But we do know, or should know, that to ask for people to form a human community because that seems a good way to live is too much to ask. Engels, following Morgan and the notes of Marx, suggests in The Origin of the Family that human beings once organised their daily lives so that motherhood was shared, not only to alleviate the burden on a single ‘biological’ mother, but also to incorporate the child into the group as a child of the group. Two, or three, or more fathers are better than one; two or three or more mothers are better than one. He also describes the political conventions which guaranteed matriliny, matrilineal descent, the mother-right, partible paternity. Upstartism, the swagger of one who wants to lord it over the rest, in such a community was quickly diffused. We can see how upstartism is handled within egalitarian bands and tribes to this day, and this is either a direct expression of a matrilineal organisation, or a relic of it. Engels called the switch from matriliny to patriliny: ‘this revolution – one of the most decisive ever experienced by humanity’. The base cause of all the consciousness of what is against us emanates, as Marx and Engels always implied, from the family in its modern form, it comes from the domination of women, which is enacted by prohibiting collective maternal control of childcare. Full maternal control of childcare necessarily conditioned the whole political structure of the group. Marx saw the complete suppression of private property as the route which would return man ‘from religion, the family, the state, etc., to his human, i.e. social existence’. Note that he says, the family, by which he means our modern conception and institution of the family. But this social existence is perhaps predicated more upon a conscious political form which enabled easy living and prevented domination and division, than the conscious suppression of private property. Thus the hart we seek might only be visible askance, as your tactic demands - neither in the phantom of a for-itself-community nor in the negative of the alienated society - though both must remain within our field of view.’