The Need for Reformation
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (c1466-1536) is one of my most favourite figures in the history of ideas, a man who combined the mildest of tempers with the sharpest of pens. He was a trenchant critic of the Catholic Church, so much so that he was described as the man that laid the egg that Martin Luther hatched. Erasmus incited the Reformation with his words but didn't join it in his person. If he was not a man to break egg shells in practice, he most certainly did in theory – and did have something of a taste for omelettes. The relationship between criticism and action is seldom direct. Theory and practice are a unity in theory, but seldom so in practice.
I'd like to make a few observations on the tyranny and violence of abstract ideas and thought.
The quote from Erasmus' Praise of Folly in this graphic applies generally to abstractors and dividers, merchants of all kinds, all those who predate on the commons, as well as to their counterparts the bureaucrats and theocrats of knowledge, power, and politics, of which there is never a shortage of candidates. Both groups often present themselves as rivals, splitting along the lines of private goods and public goods, each offered as the true and only path to freedom and happiness. All the myriad false oppositions driving the political controversies of modern liberal society can be found in this split: market vs state, individualism vs collectivism, freedom vs authority and so on. Put simply, the abstractors are all those who seek to govern the people by extraneous force - whether this takes the form of the 'invisible hand' of the market or the visible hand of 'the state,' (by which I mean, in Marx’s words, 'the abstraction of the political state' as 'a modern product,' (Marx, Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State)). The state and capital are twin abstracting processes that remove power and control from the associated individuals who compose the social body. The modern centralised state is the counterpart of the abstract, alien power of capital, both arising hand in hand in a process by which the people were separated from the commons and made subject to external institutional and systemic force. The abstractors are all those who bamboozle, then - and silence - you with reasons and rationales, and with facts and figures (of all kinds), using numbers to count you out and words to spell-bind.
I have written at length of capital and the critique of political economy elsewhere. I’ll focus here on its twin authoritarian and bureaucratic power. People know Marx for his critique of the capital system. Much less well known is his critique of the modern state as an abstract and alien power removed from the individuals composing the demos. As a result, Marx is often translated back into the liberal terrain that he superseded and thus made a proponent of an abstract collectivism – socialism as a bureaucratic governmental socialism - as against an abstract individualism. This is an utterly false. Marx traced both abstractions to their social roots in the alienation human beings from their social power under capitalist relations, uprooting them at source and restituting that power to its social origins. Marx's critique of the abstraction of the state and the bureaucratic approach to reality is emphatic. Marx identified the rise of the modern state and capital as a singular process, with both the state and capital as alienated social power to be restituted to the democratically restructured social body.
Marx presents a forthright critique of bureaucratic rationality at work in politics. His words should be pondered at length, given the tendency of modern bureaucrats of thought, knowledge, and politics to present themselves as humanity's saviours as against the capital system – the truth is that exploitative economics and bureaucratic politics are twin social processes within capitalist relations.
Marx writes: ‘Whatever is real is treated bureaucratically, in accordance with its transcendental, spiritual, essence. The bureaucracy holds the state, the spiritual essence of society, in thrall, as its private property.’ The bureaucracy is a false universal society. ‘The universal spirit of bureaucracy is secrecy, it is mystery preserved within itself by means of the hierarchical structure and appearing to the outside world as a self-contained corporation.’ Marx thus characterises bureaucracy by a systematic social division of labour and a hierarchy of authority. Drawing an analogy between bureaucracy and the machine, Marx writes that the principles of bureaucracy are those of passive obedience, of faith in authority, of the mechanism of fixed and formalistic behaviour:
‘The principle of its knowledge is therefore authority, and its patriotism is the adulation of authority. Within itself, however, spiritualism degenerates into crass materialism, the materialism of passive obedience, the worship of authority, the mechanism of fixed, formal action, of rigid principles, views and traditions.’
Marx, Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State, Early Writings 1975: 109
Bureaucratic hierarchy, Marx continues, 'is a hierarchy of knowledge’ in which the top entrusts the understanding of detail to the lower levels, whilst the lower levels credit the top with an understanding of the general, and all are mutually deceived:
The bureaucracy is a magic circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of knowledge. The apex entrusts insight into particulars to the lower echelons while the lower echelons credit the apex with insight into the universal, and so each deceives the other.
Marx CHDS EW 1975: 109
Marx exposes the inherently authoritarian, elitist, and hierarchical character of bureaucratic abstraction and rationalisation: 'Authority is the basis of its knowledge.' (Marx CHDS EW 1975: 59/60).
My contention is that the bureaucrats are still with us, still making their claim to public power on account of embodying and serving the public interest. Such people use symbols – words and numbers - to spin their myths of salvation, even if that exalted notion has now been reduced to mere survival these days of purposeless mechanarchy. All that human beings could dream and desire is made conditional upon saviours who alone, they claim, possess the magical alchemy for the satisfaction of desire; or, rather, in an age in which the planet has been put on suicide watch grace of the capital system, mere survival. The word ‘desire’ is composed of the Latin prefix ‘de-,’ which means ‘lack of something’ and the word ‘sidus’ which means ‘star.’ We are hearing the word 'disaster' a lot in these days of climate change and global heating. The global heat machine driving that social and ecological disaster was built on the separation of human beings from their commons, from the sources of life, belonging, and meaning. Those are the things that human beings desire as social, spiritual, and natural beings, and it is these things that they lack under the capital system. The word 'disaster' derives from the Latin 'dis-', meaning 'away', 'without', and 'astro', meaning 'star'. Hence 'disaster' means to be 'without a star.’ Dante ends every canto of the Comedy with the stars.
Wishing for something literally means ‘lack of stars,’ ‘to feel a lack of stars,’ a lack implying a passionate searching. Human beings search for meaning and connection, and feel abstraction as a loss.
The capitalist class, of course, don't see things this way. The capital system is based on the separation of human beings from the means of their self-actualisation, from the commons, and its return in monetized form. To them, the waste and luxury which is now suffocating and choking the planet is a material largesse which is capable of satisfying the largest of human appetites, wealth-creation on a scale that dwarfs every age in history, for which they solicit thanks and praise, not condemnation. They do not see the social and spiritual loss that lies behind such largesse. The endless accumulation of material quantities is considered sufficient to fill the gaping hole where the soul once was.
Who will our saviours be?
There are no shortage of candidates to fill the vacancy. But it's not up for popular vote, it is a matter of appropriation. The real question is which group will succeed in claiming the global commons?
Marx's chosen candidate is the proletariat, the 'universal class' as the class upon whose exploited labour society as a whole rests, and whose self-emancipation would thus emancipate the whole of society from exploitative relations. Workers of all lands unite, Marx urged, you have nothing to lose but your chains, and a world to win. That world has still to be won. Indeed, that world is now imperilled by an eco-catastrophe grace of the global heat machine unleashed by the expropriators. The proletariat has been outclassed. The exploiters, expropriators, and free-riders have succeeding in persuading society at large that they, the parasites, are actually the wealth-creators, expropriating the global commons and selling it back in little pieces at large prices and expecting thanks and praise for their entrepreneurial skill and genius. They have broken up the solidarity of the working people by globalising the division of labour, incentivising atomisation by throwing down ladders of gold to invite the greedy and gullible, inviting individuals to break rank to come and join the golden hordes, on condition of elbowing rivals out of the way and treading their compatriots underfoot. It's an appropriation and perversion of redemptive myth.
That's the entrepreneurs, and a bad bunch they are. Then there are the bureaucrats, an authoritarian mafia armed with facts and figures, and a knowledge of 'nature' as an unarguable, unquestionable, and unanswerable 'necessity.' They may not promise the redemption that the merchants of mammon offer by way of their apocalypse of accumulation, but they do have an appeal in offering to save us from that apocalypse. They are the merchants’ counter-image, as is the state to capital. They are twins in a singular process of abstraction. It would be tempting to call them rival twins of good and bad, were it not for the fact that both present themselves as having the interests of the people at heart, and whilst proceeding to usurp their sovereign power and labour. Twins of evil, then.
Increasingly, it's not redemption that the bureaucrats of knowledge and politics offer, merely survival. Averting disaster by such means, however, does not restore what has been lost, merely attempts to stave off the inevitable. The shrines of socialism having been stripped and plundered and trampled underfoot by the golden entrepreneurial hordes, taking the redemptive role of the working class for themselves to boot, there's nothing left for what's left of the Left other than sheer survival. This is disaster socialism as a counterpart to disaster capitalism, a mutual suicide pact in which the twin reefs of liberalism fight it out to the bitter end. Survival is a more realistic narrative in these more ecologically straitened times now that the myth of labour has been turned inside out and upside down. If the rich are the marauders, then the bureaucrats of thought and politics present themselves as the true agents of deliverance.
Lost is the entire sense of the transformative and creative agency of the working class and the demos. 'Ordinary' are passive and dependent on processes and agencies that are external to and above them. Working men and women will remain a downtrodden, exploited class of no account, and an irredeemably fallen class now that they have had to give up their redemptive role to their conquerors.
Oddly, though, this society that holds 'ordinary' people in such contempt still can't do without them. Should the day come when 'ordinary' folk cease working, the lights would go out, and a lot more besides. Covid-19 has just proven the indispensability of the people who, economically, politically, culturally are exploited, overlooked, ridiculed, abused, denigrated, devalued, scorned, and ignored.
It is time to put fringe issues to one side and give expression to the 'gut' issues.
The hostile usurpation of the role formerly assigned to the exploited and the oppressed has become so entrenched and normalised that to even attempt to rescue the working class from what historian E.P. Thompson called 'the enormous condescension of posterity' is to invite criticisms of a labour metaphysics and nostalgia.
Our new redeemers and saviours practise a metaphysics of their own, though, arrogating a spiritual supremacy to their position to add to their material dominance. They have no need of textual sanction, still less revelation or prophecy, whether it is found in Marx and Capital or God and the Bible. Some have the money, finance, and power to impose their perceptions of reality, others have 'the science' and Reason and evidence and logic. All claim to possess a privileged insight into the workings of new gods, whether those gods are 'the economy,' (that slippery euphemism for capital), or 'nature,' that external, objective datum that is passively observed at a distance by 'the scientists.' I put these terms in brackets not to attack nature and science, but to draw attention to the extent to which natural science is too often and too freely invoked with authoritative command and intent and used for purposes of political legitimacy. I do this to underline the dangers of science, like religion, economics, and any human practice and discipline, coming to function as politics and ideology, naturalising and rationalising particular views conforming to prevailing conceptions and power-relations and thereby falsely imposing authoritative standards to be uncritically followed in politics and society.
The same points apply with respect to maths and the numbers, facts and reason, logic. Whilst logic takes most people only from A to B, it takes the new saviours of the age of apocalypse to the Empyrean, which they have annexed to their own worldly concerns, seceding from society and the need for contact and engagement with ‘ordinary’ people all the better to govern the social world more authoritatively and effectively. It is only possible to say 'yes' to the Olympians, yielding to the force of their better arguments.
The bureaucrats of knowledge, thought, politics, and power inhabit an ethereal topography which soars high above all political, moral, social, and cultural entities, even above all linguistic entities - insofar as they employ numbers and symbols, financial or otherwise. The people have been deprived of their voice; they have been deprived of their capacity to say 'no' to their superiors. The bureaucrats don't speak the common language of the common people, for the very reason it is common, shared by all, and gives ‘common’ folk a ‘yes’ and ‘no’ of their own. They have mastered the art of being both exoteric and esoteric. And they hold the common folk in contempt, even as they claim to know a few and, even, to have spoken to one or two.
I don't care for much for the bureaucrats of thought, knowledge, and politics. I find unintelligent, insensitive, and inhuman. And elitist, authoritarian, and totalitarian to their marrow.
And just to be clear, this argument is not premised on the crude simplicities of elite and mass. On the contrary, it is part of my general commitment to a 'rational freedom' that self-conscious, active, and informed members of the citizen body are able to recognise the need for rule and regulation and assume responsibility for the collective management of their common affairs by common consent. Dualisms of authoritarianism and libertarianism arise from the false liberal ontology that separates the two essential aspects of human nature, individuality and sociality.
"Reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world."
- Terence McKenna
As for Erasmus, I wrote a little paper on him in 2016. He is a very reasonable man, very tempered. Whilst his words implied a total reformation, his temper urged restraint in practice.
Concord, harmony, and co-operation are built into the nature of things. People who argue this now are saying nothing that wasn't noted centuries ago. That observation is only the beginning of wisdom, not the end. It is that relative autonomy of human beings - free-will - that the Bible notes, what Marx calls the mediated exchange between humanity and nature, that is crucial. Sooner or later, the question comes to social existence and ethics. Ignore that and you are just restating the easy things - interconnection, harmony, co-operation etc etc. Yes. we've spotted those things. Now can we get to the issues at stake in the field of practical reason. Erasmus gets into the twin sources of violence - between nations, between persons within societies, within individuals - are a) false ambitions and b) wicked desires. It requires public guidance, enacting laws to encourage people to move away from such ambitions and desires. We live in an age that encourages those things, on the assumption of natural sympathy/self-interest bringing about harmony. I see notions of 'enlightened self-interest' being rehashed and reheated again, now with the support of natural selection - no need for any extraneous force to produce harmony and unity (and, not inconveniently, no need to confront power and iniquitous power relations). It's evasive nonsense. There's much greater sense in Erasmus' "The Complaint of Peace."