Goat Germs

Split "Chancro / W"

2012-01-25T04:23:00.000-08:00

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Pure - "Fever Dreams"

2012-01-23T01:22:00.000-08:00

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Albert Ayler - "Stockholm,Berlin 1966"

2012-01-22T09:34:00.000-08:00

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Cut Hands – "Afro Noise I"

2012-01-19T14:23:00.000-08:00

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Ultra - "Live 1986"

2012-01-14T07:55:00.000-08:00

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Electromeca – "Rhythm Issues"

2012-01-11T10:34:00.000-08:00

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Erich Mühsam - "Die Psychologie der Erbtante"

2012-01-08T21:21:00.000-08:00

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The Amputease - "Sick Jazz"

2011-12-29T02:19:00.000-08:00

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MK-Ultra Discography

2011-12-25T06:01:00.000-08:00

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v/A - Town of Hardcore

2011-12-25T05:31:00.000-08:00

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Killer Bob - "Cleveland"

2011-12-18T11:27:00.000-08:00

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Comity- "The Journey Is Over Now"

2011-12-15T07:02:00.000-08:00

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Beytah - "Menufracturing"

2011-12-09T06:37:00.000-08:00

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Debt and Violence

2011-11-30T10:14:00.000-08:00

In this essay I don’t want so much to delve into the philosophical questions as to lay out the historical groundwork, the rhythmic structure of history if imagined as a history of debt. Here my training as an anthropologist becomes particularly useful. One of the traditional roles of the economic anthropologist is to point out that the standard narrative set out in economic textbooks — the one we all take for granted,really, that once upon a time there was barter; that when this became too inconvenient, people invented money; that eventually, this lead to abstract systems of credit and debt, banking, and the New York Stock Exchange — is simply wrong. There is in fact no known example of a human society whose economy is based on barter of the ‘I’ll give you ten chickens for that cow’ variety. Most economies that don’t employ money — or anything that we’d identify as money, anyway — operate quite differently. They are, as French anthropologist Marcel Mauss famously put it, ‘gift economies’ where transactions are either based on principles of open-handed generosity, or, when calculation does take place, most often descend into competitions over who can give the most away. What I want to emphasise here, though, is what happens when money does first appear in something like it’s current form (basically, with the appearance of the state). Because here, it becomes apparent that not only do the economists get it wrong, they get it precisely backwards. In fact, virtual money comes first. Banking, tabs, and expense accounts existed for at least 2 thousand years before there was anything like coinage, or any other physical object that was regularly used to buy and sell things, anything that could be labeled ‘currency’.‘Money’ in that modern sense, a uniform commodity not only chosen to measure the value of other commodities, but actually stamped in uniform denominations and paid out every time anyone bought or sold something, was an Iron Age innovation — most likely, invented to pay mercenaries. Barter in the sense imagined by Adam Smith, the direct exchange of arrowheads for shoes or the like, can sometimes develop at the margins between societies, or as part of international trade, but it mainly tends to occur in places where people have become accustomed to the use of money and then that supply of money disappears. Examples of the latter include some parts of 18th and 19th century West Africa, or more recently, if more briefly, in Russia or Argentina. What follows is a fragment of a much larger project of research on debt and debt money in human history. The first and overwhelming conclusion of this project is that in studying economic history, we tend to systematically ignore the role of violence, the absolutely central role of war and slavery in creating and shaping the basic institutions of what we now call ‘the economy’. What’s more, origins matter. The violence may be invisible, but it remains inscribed in the very logic of our economic common sense, in the apparently self-evident nature of institutions that simply would never and could never exist outside of the monopoly of violence — but also, the systematic threat of violence — maintained bythe contemporary state. Let me start with the institution of slavery, whose role, I think, is key. In most times and places, slavery is seen as a consequence of war. Sometimes most slaves actually are war captives, sometimes they are not, but almost invariably, war is seen as the foundation and justification of the institution. If you surrender in war, what you surrender is your life; your conqueror has the right to kill you, and often will. If he chooses not to, you literally owe your life to him, a debt conceived as absolute, infinite, irredeemable. He can in principle extract anything he wants, and all debts — obligations — you may owe to others (your friends, family, former political allegiances), or that others therefore owe you, are seen as being absolutely negated. Your debt to your owner is all that now exists. This sort of logic has at least two very interesting consequences, though they might be said to pull in rather contrary directions. First of all, as we all know, it is another typical — perhaps defining — feature of slavery that slaves can be bought or sold. In this case, absolute debt becomes (in another context, that of the market) no longer absolute — in fact, it can be precisely quantified. There is good reason to believe that it was precisely this operation that made it possible to create something like our contemporary form of money to begin with, since what anthropologists used to refer to as ‘primitive money’, the kind that one finds in stateless societies (Solomon Island feather money, Iroquois wampum), was mostly used to arrange marriages, resolve blood-feuds, and fiddle with other sorts of relations between people rather than to buy and sell commodities. For instance, if slavery is debt, then debt can lead to slavery. A Babylonian peasant might have paid a handy sum in silver to his wife’s parents to officialise the marriage, but he in no sense owned her. He certainly couldn’t buy or sell the mother of his children. But all that would change if he took out a loan. Were he to default, his creditors could first remove his sheep and furniture, then his house, fields and orchards, and, finally, take his wife, children, and even himself as debt peons until the matter was settled (which, as his resources vanished, of course became increasingly difficult to do.) Debt was the hinge that made it possible to imagine money in anything like the modern sense, and therefore, too, to produce what we like to call the market: an arena where anything can be bought and sold, because all objects are (like slaves) disembedded from their former social relations and exist only in relation to money. But at the same time the logic of debt as conquest can, as I mentioned, pull another way. Kings, throughout history, tend to be profoundly ambivalent towards allowing the logic of debt to get completely out of hand. This is not because they are hostile to markets. On the contrary, they normally encourage them, for the simple reason that governments find it inconvenient to levy everything they need (silks, chariot wheels, flamingo tongues, lapis lazuli) directly from their subject population; it’s much easier to encourage markets and then buy them. Early markets often followed armies or royal entourages, or formed near palaces or on the fringes of military posts. This actually helps explain more, rather puzzling behavior on the part of royal courts: after all, since kings usually controlled the gold and silver mines, what exactly was the point of stamping bits of the stuff with your face on it, dumping it on the civilian population, and then demanding they give it back to you again as taxes? It only makes sense if levying taxes was really a way to force everyone to acquire coins, so as to facilitate the rise of markets, since markets were convenient to have around. However, for our present purposes, the critical question is: how were these taxes justified? Why did subjects owe them, what debt were they discharging when they were paid? Here we return again to right of conquest. (Actually, in the ancient world, free citizens — whether in Mesopotamia, Greece, or Rome — often did not have to pay direct taxes for this very reason, but for obvious reasons I’m simplifying here.) If kings claimed to hold the power of life and death over their subjects by right of conquest, then their subjects’ debts were, also, ultimately infinite; and also, at least in that context, their relations to one another, what they owed to one another, was unimportant; all that really existed was their relation to the king. This in turn explains why kings and emperors invariably tried to regulate the powers that masters had over slaves, and creditors over debtors. At the very least they would always insist, if they had the power, that the lives of war prisoners having once been spared, their masters could no longer kill them; that, in fact, only rulers could have arbitrary power over life and death. One’s ultimate debt was to the state; it was the only one that was truly unlimited, that could make absolute, cosmic, claims. The reason I stress this is because this logic is still with us. When we speak of a ‘society’ (French society, Jamaican society) we are really speaking of people organised by a single nation state. That is the tacit model, anyway. ‘Societies’ are really states, the logic of states is that of conquest, the logic of conquest is ultimately identical to that of slavery. True, in the hands of state apologists, this becomes transformed into a notion of a more benevolent ‘social debt’. Here there is a little story told, a kind of myth. We are all born with an infinite debt to the society that raised, nurtured, fed and clothed us, to those long dead who invented our language and traditions, to all those who made it possible for us to exist. In ancient times we thought we owed this to the gods (it was repaid in sacrifice — or, sacrifice was really just the payment of interest — ultimately, it was repaid by death). Later the debt was adopted by the state — itself a divine institution — with taxes substituted for sacrifice, and military service for one’s debt of life. Money is simply the concrete form of this social debt, the way that it is managed. Keynesians like this sort of logic. So do various strains of socialist, social democrats, even crypto-fascists like Auguste Comte (the first, as far as I am aware, to actually coin the phrase ‘social debt’). But the logic also runs through much of our common sense: consider for instance, the phrase, ‘to pay one’s debt to society’, or, ‘I felt I owed something to my country’, or, ‘I wanted to give something back.’ Always, in such cases, mutual rights and obligations, mutual commitments — the kind of relations that genuinely free people could make with one another — tend to be subsumed into a conception of ‘society’ where we are all equal only as absolute debtors before the (now invisible) figure of the King, who stands in for your mother, and by extension, humanity. What I am suggesting then is that while the claims of the impersonal market, and the claims of ‘society’, are often juxtaposed — and certainly have had a tendency to jockey back and forth in all sorts of practical ways — they are both ultimately founded on a very similar logic of violence. Neither is this a mere matter of historical origins that can be brushed away as inconsequential: neither states nor markets can exist without the constant threat of force. One might ask, then, what is the alternative?

- David Graeber

Execution Techniques - "Salvation is false hope"

2011-11-27T16:47:00.000-08:00

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Split "Arseterror / Kindergarten Hazing Ritual"

2011-11-24T08:57:00.000-08:00

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Hheva - "Anger Is A Gift"

2011-11-23T16:29:00.000-08:00

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Ancient Methods – Fifth Method

2011-11-13T10:05:00.000-08:00

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Igor Wakhévitch – "Logos"

2011-11-06T08:12:00.001-08:00

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Con-Dom - "The Will Lies Dormant "

2011-11-05T07:58:00.000-07:00

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Alleypisser - "Dogging"

2011-10-25T11:57:00.000-07:00

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Merzbow - "Flesh Metal Orgasm"

2011-10-24T08:37:00.000-07:00

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i of slumber - "Slander"

2011-10-21T08:35:00.000-07:00

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Andrew Pekler -"Entanglements In The Orthopedic Sensorium"

2011-10-17T15:53:00.000-07:00

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Men´s Interest - "More War"

2011-10-04T04:27:00.001-07:00

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Split - "Strict / Painjerk"

2011-09-25T03:09:00.000-07:00

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Giles Corey - "Giles Corey"

2011-09-24T10:11:00.001-07:00

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Griefer - "Brute Force"

2011-09-21T05:09:00.000-07:00

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Eiterherd - "1984 vs. 1999 / Vision vs. Reality"

2011-09-18T11:25:00.000-07:00

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Torn Apart / Sick-Fuckin-O

2011-09-17T05:30:00.000-07:00

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Nochteff - "Pascua Paguia"

2011-09-13T05:24:00.000-07:00

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Genus Inkasso -" Occasionally Slumping, Smiling Weakly"

2011-08-27T08:06:00.000-07:00

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Psychology of the State

2011-08-19T05:34:00.000-07:00

Psychologists recognize the gregarious impulse as one of the strongest primitive pulls which keeps together the herds of the different species of higher animals. Mankind is no exception. Our pugnacious evolutionary history has prev~nted the impulse from ever dying out. This gregarious impulse is the tendency to imitate, to conform, to coalesce together, and is most powerful when the herd believes itself threatened with attack. Animals crowd together for protection, and men become most conscious of their collectivity at the threat of war. Consciousness of collectivity brings confidence and a feeling of massed strength, which in turn arouses pugnacity and the battle is on. In civilized man, the gregarious impulse acts not only to produce concerted action for defense, but also to produce identity of opinion. Since thought is a form of behavior, the gregarious impulse floods up into its realms and demands that sense of uniform thought which wartime produces so successfully. And it is in this flooding ofthe conscious life of society that gregariousness works its havoc. For just as in modem societies the sex-instinct is enormously oversupplied for the requirements of human propagation, so the gregarious impulse is enormously over-supplied for the work ofprotection which it is called upon to perform. It would be quite enough if we were gregarious enough to enjoy the companionship of others, to be able to cooperate with them, and to feel a slight malaise at solitude. Unfortunately, however, this impulse is not content with these reasonable and healthful demands, but insists that like mindedness shall prevail everywhere, in all departments of life, so that all human progress, all novelty, and nonconformity must be carried against the resistance of this tyrannical herd-instinct which drives the individual into obedience and conformity with the majority. Even in the most modem and enlightened societies this impulse shows little sign of abating. As it is 9.riven byinexorable economic demand out of the sphere of utility, it seems to fasten itself ever more fiercely in the realm of feeling and opinion, so that conformity comes to be a thing aggressively desired and demanded. The gregarious impulse keeps its hold all the more virulently because whenthe group is in motion or is taking any positive action, this feeling of being with and supported by the collective herd very greatly feeds that will to power, the nourishment of which the individual organism so constantly demands. You feel powerful by conforming, and you feel forlorn and helpless if you· are out of the crowd. While even if you do not get any access to power by thinking and feeling just as everybody else in your group does, you get at least the warm feeling of obedience, the soothing irresponsibility·ofprotection. Joining as it does to these very vigorous tendencies of the individual the pleasure in power and the pleasure of obedience-this gregarious impulse becomes irresistible in society. War stimulates it to the highest possible degree, sending the influence of its mysterious herd-current with its inflations ofpower and obedience to the farthest reaches of the society, to every individUal and little group that can possibly be affected. And it is these impulses which the State-the organization of the entire herd, the entire collectivity-is founded on and makes use of. There is, of course, in the feeling towards the State a large element of pure filial mysticism. The sense of insecurity, the desire for protection, sends one's desire backto the father and mother, with whom is associated the earliest feelings of protection. It is not for nothing that one's State is still thought of as Father or Motherland, that one's relation towards it is conceived in terms of family affection. The war has shown that nowhere under the shock ofdanger have these primitive childlike attitudes failed to assert themselves again, as much in this country as anywhere. If we have not the intense Father-sense ofthe German who worships his Vaterland, at least in Uncle Sam we have a symbol ofprotecting, kindly authority, and in the many Mother-posters of the Red Cross, we see how easily in the -more tender functions ofwar service, the ruling organization is conceived in family terms. A people at war have become in the most literal sense obedient, respectful, trustful children again, full of that naive faith in the all-wisdom and all-power ofthe adult who takes care of them, imposes his mild but necessary rule upon them and in whom they lose their responsibility and anxieties. In this recrudescence of the child, there is great comfort, and a certain influx ofpower. On most people the strain ofbeing an independent adult weighs heavily, and upon none more than those members of the significant classes who have bequeathed to thelll; or have assumed the responsibilities of governing. The State provides the convenientest ofsymbols under which these classes can retain all the actual pragmatic satisfaction ofgoverning, but can rid themselves of the psychic burden ofadulthood. They continue to direct industry and government and all the institutions of society pretty much as before, but in their own conscious eyes and in the eyes of the general public,·they are turned from their selfish and predatory ways, and have .become loyal ..servants of society, or. something. greater than they-the State. The man who moves from the direction of a large business in New York to a post in the war management industrial service in Washington ..does not apparently alter very much his power or his administrative technique. But psychically, what a transformation has occurred! His is not now only the power but the glory! And his sense of satisfaction is directly proportional not to the genuine amount ofpersonal sacrifice that may be involved in the change but to the extent to which he retains his industrial prerogatives and sense of command. From members of this class a certain insuperable indignation arises if the change from private enterprise to State service involves any real loss of power and personal privilege. If there is to be any pragmatic sacrifice, let it be, they feel, on the field ofhonor, in the traditionally acclaimed deaths by battle, in that detour to suicide, as Nietzsche calls war. The State in wartime supplies satisfaction for this very real craving, but its chief value is the opportunity it gives for this regression to infantile attitudes. In your reaction to an imagined attack on your country or an insult to its government, you draw closer to the herd for protection, you conform in word and deed, and you act together. And you fix your adoring gaze upon the State, with a truly filial look, as upon the Father ofthe flock, the quasipersonal symbol ofthe strength ofthe herd, and the leader and determinant ofyour definite action and ideas. .The members of the working-classes, that portion at least which does not identify itselfwith the significant classes and seek to imitate it and rise to it, are notoriously less affected by the symbolism of the State, or, in other words, are less patriotic than the significant classes. For theirs is neither the power nor the gloiy. The State in wartime does not offer them the opportunity to regress, for, never having acquired social adulthood, they cannot lose it. If they have been drilled and regimented, as by the industrial regime ofthe last century, they go out docilely enough to do battle for their State, but they are almost entirely without that filial sense and even without that herd-intellCtct sense which operates so powerfully among their "betters." They live habitually in an industrially serfdom, by which though nominally free, they are. in practice as a class bound to a system of a machine-production, the implements ofwhich they do now own,and in the distribution ofwhose product they have not the slightest voice, except what they can occasionally exert bya veiled;intimidation which draws slightly more of the product in their direction. From· such serfdom, military conscription is not so great a change. But into the military enterprise they go, not with those hurrahs of the significant classes whose instincts war so powerfully feeds,butwith the same apathy with which they· enter and continue in the industrial enterprise. From this point ofview, war can be called almost an upper-class sport. The novel interests and excitements it provides, the inflations ofpower, the satisfaction it gives to those very tenacious human impulses-·.gregariousness and parent-regression-endow it with all the qualities of a luxurious collective game which is felt intensely just in proportion to the sense of significant rule the person has in the class-division ofbis society. A country at war-particularly our own country at war~oes not act asa purely homogenous herd. The s~gnificant classes have all the herd-feeling·in all Its primitive intensity, so that this feeling does not flow freely without impediment throughout the entire nation. A modern country represents a long historical and social. process of disaggregation of the nerd. The .national at peace is not a group, it isa network of myriads of groups representing the cooperation and similar feeling. of menon.all-·sorts of planes and in all sorts ofhuman interests andenterprises.cIn.every modem industrial coUntry, there are parallel planes of economic· classes with divergent attitudes and institutions and interests-bourgeois and proletariat-.with their many subdivisions according to power. and function, and even their interweaving, such.as those more highly skilled workers who habitually· identify themselves with the owning and the significant classes and strive to raise themselves to the bourgeois level, imitating their cultural standards and manners. Then there are religious groups with a certain definite, though weakening sense of kinship, and there are the powerful ethnic groups which behave almost as cultural colonies in the New World, clinging tenaciously to language and historical tradition, though their herdishness is usually founded on cultural rather than State symbols. There are certain vague section al groups. All these small sects, political parties, classes, levels, interests, may act as foci for herd-feelings. They intersect and interweave, andthe same person may be a member of several different groups lying at different planes. Different occasions will set offhis herdfeeling in one direction or another. In a religious crisis he will be intensely conscious of the necessity that his sect-or sub-herd-may prevail; in a political campaign, that his party shall triumph. To the spread ofherd-feeling~ therefore, all these smaller herds offer resistance. To the spread ofthat herd-feeling which arises from the threat of war, and which would normally involve the entire nation, the only groups which make serious resistance are those, of course, which continue to identify themselves with the other nation from which they or their parents have come. In times of peace they are for all practical purposes citizens oftheir newcolijltry. They keep C\!jvetheir ethnic. traditions more as a luxury than anything. Irtdeed these traditions tend rapidly to die out except where they connect with some still unresolved nationalistic cause abroad, with some struggle for freedom, or some irredentism. If they are consciously opposed by a too invidious policy ofAmericanism, they tend to be strengthened. And in time ofwar, these ethnic elements which have any traditfonal.connection with the enemy, even though most of the individuals may have· little real sympathy with the enemy's cause, are naturally lukewarm to.the hard-feeling9fthe·nation with goes back to State ttaditionsmwh1~h they have no shart:,_~Butto the natives imbued with State...reeling, any such resistance or apa,~y .is intolerable.~_This herdfeeling,~ isnewly.. awakened cons,?ioust)ess of. the State, demands universality. The leaders o£the significant classes, .who feel most intensely this .State-compulsion, dem~d a on~. hun
- Randolph Bourne

The Mekons - "The Quality Of Mercy Is Not Strnen"

2011-08-16T02:49:00.000-07:00

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Bretschneider & Steinbrüchel - "Status"

2011-08-12T05:16:00.000-07:00

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Emptyset - "Demiurge"

2011-08-08T06:27:00.001-07:00

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Essa.M - "Point Paradis"

2011-08-07T09:46:00.000-07:00

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Convectorh - "Matter's Rebellion"

2011-08-06T10:10:00.000-07:00

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v/A - DATADADAISM

2011-08-03T15:00:00.000-07:00

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Utoya – über einen radikalen Verlierer und ein Buch das nicht gedruckt gehört

2011-07-27T02:11:00.000-07:00

Ein braunes Sakko. Eine abscheuliche silberne Krawatte. Ein weißes Hemd. Modische Erneuerungen entsprechen den in der Tierwelt entdeckten Anpassungserscheinungen. Durch verschiedene Umstände bedingt, ruft die alte Form quasi die neue hervor, doch die von mir beschriebenen Ingredienzien sprechen eher für etwas altes, verbrauchtes, überflüssiges. Sie sprechen für Plunder oder Kitsch. Aber stoppen wir nicht beim Hemdkragen. Ein milchiges Gesicht in das ein grotesker Mund gefranst wurde, lugt gen Kamera. Was die toten, kristallinen Augen in diesem Moment wohl sehen mögen ? Und was geht dem Ich hinter diesen Augen durch den Kopf ? Das blonde Haare fällt frisiert ins Gesicht und markiert doch gleichzeitig nichts. Wenn man einen Schritt zurückgeht und das Counterfeit von Anders Behring Breivik so betrachtet, könnte man auf die Idee kommen, dass sein Gesicht auf dem Computer erstellt worden ist. Er wirkt so merkwürdig unecht. Wie eine Puppe, die von vornherein dazu verdammt ist, ein ewiger Ladenhüter zu sein. Die Medien benutzen sehr gerne seine Facebook-Photos und es wird beim weiteren Lesen nicht überraschen, dass er die Bilder vor seiner Tat genau deshalb knipste. Was man auf den Bildern sieht, ist die Blaupause eines charakterlosen Menschen, einer Mogelpackung. Ob er diesen Charakter während seines fünfjährigen Studiums verlor oder während seiner nicht enden wollenden 12Stunden-Schichten bei der Firma „E-Commerce Group“ oder vielleicht nie einen Charakter aufbauen konnte, da sich seine Eltern bereits ein Jahr nach seiner Geburt scheiden ließen, ist unklar. Fest steht das er zu mindestens eine Weile dafür Ersatz in der „Fremskrittspartiet“ bekam. Die „Fortschrittspartei“ ist eine von diesen Bauernfängern-Parteien, die spätestens seit dem Einsetzen der Finanzkrise deutlich an Zuspruch gewonnen haben.
Er erreichte so auch ein Pöstchen im Vorstand des Ortsverbandes Oslo West. Hinzu kamen noch Mitgliedschaften in der Freimaurerloge „St.Olaus til de tre Soiler“ und dem Sportschützenverein „Oslo Pistolklubb“. Außerdem schrieb er in seiner Freizeit nicht nur manisch für die islamkritische Website document.no, sondern verfasste auch ein 1516 Seiten umfassendes Pamphlet. Was wir hier haben, ist kein Amokläufer, sondern ein eiskalter Auftragskiller in eigener Sache. Für einen Amokläufer, wie wir ihn popkulturell mittlerweile schätzen, war er in seinem Leben schlicht und ergreifend zu fleißig und ist außerdem zu alt. Die Dylan Klebolds dieser Welt werden in den seltensten Fällen älter als 20. Zum einen sind sie die letzte Entwicklungsstufe des Phänomens Rockstar, denn durch das Auslöschen von etwa ein dutzend Menschenleben begeistern sie Millionen. Zum anderen sind sie wirklich offensichtliche Verlierer: weitesgehend hobbylos, meist aus sozial komplett dysfunktionalen Familien der unteren Mittelschicht stammend, intelligent aber mit einem beträchtlichem Aufmerksamkeitsdefizit versehen. Sie sind die Spitze des Eisberges einer Generation die reflexiv impotent ist. Sie wissen, dass die Dinge schlecht sind, aber vielmehr als das, wissen sie auch das sie nichts daran ändern können. Aber dieses Wissen hat ja nichts reflexives. Es ist die passive Beobachtung bereits bestehender Dinge, eine selbsterfüllende Prophezeiung. Selbstredend werden sie auch das wissen. Dieser depressive Hedonismus äußert sich in erster Linie daran, nichts aber auch gar nichts außer dem eigenen Privatvergnügen verfolgen zu können. Sicherlich besteht das Gefühl, dass etwas fehlt – aber das Verständnis, dass dieses geheimnisvolle Fremde, nämlich echte Freude nur jenseits des Lustprinzips zu finden wäre, fehlt Ihnen komplett. Das liegt zu großen Teilen daran, dass das emotionale Leben zwischen ihrem Dasein als Schüler und somit Teil einer Institution im realen Leben und ihrem Dasein als Konsumenten in den Web 2.0 Plattformen dieser Welt zerwalzt wird. Da bleibt am Ende nur das, was wir aus Filmen eines George A. Romero kennen: Fressen und Töten. Es sind Zombies. Sie entstehen nicht durch das Fehlverhalten der Eltern oder durch Ausgrenzung der Mitschüler. Sie entstehen durch diametral verlaufende Strukturen, die die Persönlichkeitsentwicklung diffamieren.
Anders Breivik dagegen ist von seinem Profil her eher ein Streber und Macher. 1516 Seiten schreiben sich nicht von alleine. Dazu kommen noch Mitgliedschaften in einem Sportverein, eine Tätigkeit in einer Partei und den Freimaurern, das Bewirtschaften eines Hofes und die zwölf Stunden tägliches Arbeitspensum wollen wir auch nicht vergessen. Kurz bevor die internationale Mediengemeinschaft ihn kennenlernte, half er noch mit die Norwegian Defence League NDL aufzubauen. Seilschaften müssen gepflegt werden. In einem Sportverein müssen Leistungen erbracht werden. Er ist im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes ein Hyperaktiver, der stets auf der Stelle trampelte, weil er sich dadurch einen Standpunkt erhoffte. Er ist jemand der leicht begeisterungsfähig ist. Mit Sicherheit gehört Geduld nicht zu seinen Tugenden. Dagegen steht allerdings eine wirklich unmenschliche Beharrlichkeit und ein eiserner Willen. Schließlich lautet seine Email-Adresse schon seit 2009 year2083@gmail.com. Beinhaltet also den Namen des Pamphlets, dass er durch das Blutbad auf der Ferieninsel Utoya und dem Bombenanschlag in der Innenstadt von Oslo, verbreitet sehen möchte. Der Anschlag und der Mord an beinahe 100 Menschen war also im wesentlichen eine PR-Maßnahme. Breivik wusste genau welche mediale Wirkung ein Attentat hervorrufen würde und die Schockwellen des Ganzen kann man im Minutentakt in der Blogosphere miterleben. So beeilt sich jeder Blog der sich mit den Attributen „patriotisch“, „national“, „pro-westlich“, „anti-islamistisch“ oder „kapitalistisch“ benennt, schleunigst von ihm zu distanzieren. Die Spannbreite reicht da vom wirklichen Entsetzen bis hin dazu dass einer aus der eigenen politischen Kaste tatsächlich so blöd ist und die „Sache“ derart diskrediert. Die Krone des Ganzen stellen die schwedischen Neonazis, die sich ausdrücklich von seiner Tat distanzieren, da er als Freimaurer Teil der jüdischen Weltverschwörung sei. Natürlich haben sie jetzt alle berechtigterweise Schiss und ich gönne jeden einzelnen von Ihnen die ein oder andere Spamattacke und wenn es Bußgeldstrafen für die Betreiber einzelner Seite hageln sollte, so werde ich mit einem Lächeln im Gesicht einschlafen. Fakt es jedenfalls dass es nach Europol zwischen 2006 und 2009 1770 terroristische Anschläge in Europa gab. Nur 6 der 1770 Anschläge hatten einen islamistischen Hintergrund. Dagegen hatten 1596 der 1770 Anschläge einen rechtsextremen Hintergrund. Das Gesäusel, man habe das nicht gewusst oder so nicht gewollt, kann man sich also getrost sparen. Gerade in der äußersten politischen Rechten wimmelt es von einsamen Wölfen. Genau genommen hat die äußerste politische Rechte wahrscheinlich wirklich ungewollt die neue Angriffs-Taktik der Islamisten übernommen. Dort gibt es genau zwei Feldeinheiten: den Bibliothekar und den autistischen Gewalttäter. Der Bibliothekar stellt Informationen mit dem Schwerpunkt zur Verfügung, wie man so viele unschuldige Menschen möglichst öffentlich und medienwirksam ermorden kann. Der autistische Gewalttäter führt das Ganze dann aus. Diese Struktur hat den Vorteil, dass sie genau genommen eigentlich keine Struktur mehr ist. Die Leute kennen sich nicht untereinander. Man kann noch nicht einmal von Gruppierungen reden. Es sind Amöben. Sie hinterlassen ihren Kot hier und da und das war es. Dagegen wirkt Bakunins „Anarchistischer Katechismus“ wie ein süsser, warmherziger Schmöker.
Jedoch ist Breivik kein Neo-Nazi im „klassischen“ Sinne. Dazu ist er zu anpassungsfähig und agil. Seine Weltsicht ist ein krudes Durcheinander aus christlichem Fundamentalismus und pro-westlichen Versatzstücken, dass er mit der Effizienz einer neoliberalen Wirtschaftspolitik verbindet. Breivik ist eher ein Vernunftmonster. Pure Vernunft siegte bei ihm und das kostete 86 Jugendliche das Leben. Er wird ein gefragter Arbeitnehmer gewesen sein. Jemand der gerne Überstunden macht und sich Arbeit mit nach Hause nimmt. Seine Tat ist ein postmodernes Product-Placement, denn um die Aufmerksamkeit auf sein Machwerk zu richten, bei dem kein Verleger dieser Welt auch nur zwei Sekunden überlegt hätte, ob er es veröffentlichen sollte, dezimierte er den Nachwuchs des politischen Feindes. Die Insel Utoya ist ja keine einfache Bettenburgenfestung. Seit Jahrzehnten befindet sie sich im Besitz der norwegischen Sozialdemokratie. Es dürfte wenige norwegische Sozialdemokraten geben, die dort nicht schon einmal gewesen sind.
Die deutsche Wikipedia-Seite bietet mir unter Product-Placement folgende Beschreibung an:
„Als ´Product-Placement´ wird die im Austausch gegen Geld/Vorteile vorgenommene Integration des Namens, des Produktes, der Verpackung, der Dienstleistung oder des Unternehmenslogos eines Markenartikels oder eines Unternehmens in Massenmedien, ohne dass der Rezipient dies als störend empfinden soll, bezeichnet.“ Der Rezipient sind in dem Fall wir. Empfinden wir es als nicht störend ? Können wir also damit rechnen das „Year 2083“ eine Veröffentlichung sagen wir mal bei Suhrkamp erfährt ? Ich hoffe nicht. Aber wie das Verb hoffen schon vermuten lässt: Gepusht wird was sich eben verkaufen lässt und auf Grund des Hintergrundes dieses Buches dürfte ein Verleger damit durchaus einen Reibach erzielen. Da sich die Tragödie im Wesentlichen auf einer Ferieninsel ereignete, schoß mir beim ersten Sehen der Nachrichtenbilder automatisch der erste Teil von „Freitag, der 13.“ durch den Kopf. Nur waren es dort eine Handvoll Jugendlicher, nicht 86. Wikipedia gibt zum Product-Placement beim Themenschwerpunkt Film folgendes an:“ Product-Placement ist die gezielte Einbringung von Markenprodukten in die Handlung von Filmen. Das Ausmaß der Integration der Marke reicht von der Platzierung als Requisite, wobei die Marke für den Zuschauer deutlich erkennbar gezeigt wird, bis hin zum Verbal Product Placement, d. h. der namentlichen Nennung der Marke im Filmgeschehen. Für die Platzierung von Produkten werden, in der Regel, Geld- oder Sachzuwendungen geleistet. Richtig angefangen hat dies ungefähr Ende der 1960er Jahre, als die Produktionskosten der Filme explosionsartig stiegen.“ Breiviks Tat erreicht bei Weitem cineastistische Dimensionen. Man wird nicht lange auf eine Verfilmung warten müssen. Dabei ist die Tat als solche alleine schon ein Film gewesen, nur das die Kameras halt eben fehlten. Und wenn wir seine Tat als hyperreal werten, erfährt die baudriallardische Weisheit, das der einzige noch funktionierende politische Referent die schweigende Mehrheit ist, hier seine grauenhafte Inversion – es sind die toten Kinder. Für sie gibt es wirklich keine mögliche Representation mehr, doch Anders Behring Breivik besitzt die Dreistigkeit uns dafür seinen unlesbaren Zettelhaufen als Austausch anzubieten.
Im Wesentlichen handelt es sich bei „Year 2083“ um eine Copy+Paste-Orgie mit Texten des Bloggers Fjordman. Dieser hat nach eigenen Angaben Breivik nie persönlich kennen gelernt. Er dachte zu erst, wie wohl die Mehrheit von uns, dass es sich um einen dschihadistischen Angriff handle, dann wurde ihm langsam aber sicher bewusst, es könnte jemand aus der eigenen Leserschaft sein und leider genau dort endet auch seine Skepsis. Breivik ist in Fjordmans Augen ein christlicher Islamist und Fjordman sei ja gegen Islamismus. Es ist die narzisstische Kränkung eines Intellektuellen, aber nicht mehr und genau das ist zu wenig. Halten wir also fest:
Den Neonazi gibt es so nicht mehr. An dem Tag an dem man damit begann, Neonazis in diversen Onlineforen systematisch zu erfassen, wurden sie unsichtbar und zu Jedermanns. Nun sind diese Jedermanns geteilt in die Puristen und die Erneuerer. Die Puristen trauern weiterhin Hitler und dem 3.Reich hinterher. Sie sind gewalttätig, aber die Harmloseren von beiden. Die Erneuerer haben sie sich eine neue politische Heimat gesucht: den (Neo)-Konservativismus und den (Neo)-Liberalismus. Das gelang zum einen dadurch, weil es vermeintlich pro-westlichen Foren, Blogs, etc. ein wenig zu egal ist, wer sie denn liest und konsumiert. Zum anderen stellt es insbesondere für den Liberalismus kein Problem da in Halbheit stecken zu bleiben, also das Dulden der Kreuzung völlig absurder Positionen einfach hinzunehmen. Dabei besteht das psychopathologische Potential des Nazismus ja seit je her darin jede Form kognitiver Desintegration, also die fraglose Koexistenz völlig widersprüchlicher Annahmen einfach zu akzeptieren. Wir als Menschen haben in Europa ein Problem. Zum einen wird die politische Kultur durch diese Erneuerer des Ewiggestrigen noch mehr verstümmelt als sie ohnehin schon ist, denn der Gesetzgeber muss davon ausgehen, dass die Wahl zwischen konfligierenden Alternativen in einem Blutbad endet. Das heißt die Sphäre des Politischen wird zunehmend unbrauchbar um die pluralistische Natur der Welt des Sozialen und ihren Konflikten angemessen zu begreifen und dementsprechend zu handeln. Die einzige Möglichkeit dem Entgegenzuwirken wäre ein Konsens und da jeder Konsens auf Akten der Ausschließung fußt, müssten wir Neonazis und Kryptofaschisten (also unpolitische Maulhelden, Pseudo-Konservative und Pseudo-Liberale) aus der Gesellschaft verbannen und zwar für immer. Das hieße aber auch, das wir eine Gesellschaft, die auf Vernunft aufgebaut ist an akta legen. Wollen wir das auch nicht, müssen wir Neonazis und Islamisten erdulden, gleichzeitig aber dafür sorgen, dass sie sich nicht ausbreiten. Da eine politische Identität aber sich nur dann formen kann, wenn es etwas „anderes“ gibt, da die Identität relational ist, wird es zunehmend unmöglich eine politische Identität aufzubauen oder die Konflikte zwischen den Parteien/Fraktionen müssten in einem Rahmen bleiben, die die politische Gemeinschaft nicht zerstören und genau darauf haben es ja Neonazis und Islamisten abgesehen, denn wenn die Tat auf Utoya eines beweist, dann folgendes: Ihre Ehre heißt Feigheit. Sein Name ist Anderes Behring Breivik. Wir haben es hier mit einem ideologischen Wirrkopf zu tun, der über exzellentes Wissen im Bereich des Marketings verfügt und darüber hinaus ein gutes Planungsvermögen sein Eigen nennen kann. Gleich einem schlechten Karaoke- Sänger imitiert er den Typus des Schulamokläufers um sich auf nekrophile Art und Weise seine nicht vorhandene Jugend zu sichern und um gleichzeitig sein Vermächtnis möglichst öffentlichkeitswirksam weiterzureichen. Die toten Kinder erscheinen so als zynische Variation des Orson Welleschen „Rose Bud“ und das Buch „Year 2083“ ist ein Grabstein, aber das war es schon immer.

- JORIS J.

Emil Beaulieau / Jason Lescalleet - "Rock 'n' Roll/Toys In The Attic"

2011-07-23T09:12:00.000-07:00

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Link Wray - "Jack The Ripper"

2011-07-18T13:15:00.000-07:00

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The Day the Country Died

2011-07-16T09:09:00.000-07:00

aTelecine - "A Cassette Tape Culture"

2011-07-12T05:47:00.000-07:00

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An ill competition

2011-07-10T06:23:00.000-07:00

Anyone can enter... all you need to do is send us a track, any style any genre, any tempo... but it had better be a banger! Over the coming months we'll play the tracks on our show and put them online for listener votes. The producers of the most popular tracks will go throhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifugh to the next round and make new tracks and so on until in December only one producer is left!

We'll then work with the winner to press up a vinyl release.

The deadline for entries is the 12th of July 2011.

Full details are available at www.illfm.net/ravefactory

Lucy - "Wordplay For Working Bees"

2011-07-08T05:21:00.000-07:00

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Broken Note - "Terminal Static"

2011-07-04T09:24:00.001-07:00

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Mississippi Records Compilation -" I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore"

2011-07-01T05:42:00.000-07:00

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Crocodiles - "Summer Of Hate"

2011-06-28T04:23:00.001-07:00

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V/A - Obsession

2011-06-26T08:23:00.001-07:00

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BWK – "Human Extermination"

2011-06-16T08:02:00.001-07:00

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neuroSampler - "Transforming"

2011-06-14T02:16:00.000-07:00

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Necro Schizma – "Erupted Evil"

2011-06-13T11:30:00.000-07:00

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DOOM OST - Knee deep in the dead

2011-06-09T13:26:00.000-07:00

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Ascetic - "Holy Mountain"

2011-06-08T07:48:00.000-07:00

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LEFT AND RIGHT: THE PROSPECTS FOR LIBERTY

2011-05-24T06:35:00.000-07:00

The Conservative has long been marked, whether he
knows it or not, by long-run pessimism: by the belief that
the long-run trend, and therefore time itself, is against
him. Hence, the inevitable trend runs toward left-wing statism
at home and communism abroad. It is this long-run despair
that accounts for the Conservative’s rather bizarre short-run
optimism, for since the long run is given up as hopeless, the
Conservative feels that his only hope of success rests in the
current moment. In foreign affairs, this point of view leads the
Conservative to call for desperate showdowns with communism,
for he feels that the longer he waits the worse things will
ineluctably become; at home, it leads him to total concentration
on the very next election, where he is always hoping for
victory and never achieving it. The quintessence of the practical
man, and beset by long-run despair, the Conservative
refuses to think or plan beyond the election of the day.
Pessimism, however, both short-run and long-run, is precisely
what the prognosis of conservatism deserves, for conservatism
is a dying remnant of the ancien régime of the preindustrial
era, and, as such, it has no future. In its contemporary
American form, the recent Conservative revival embodied the death throes of an ineluctably moribund, fundamentalist,
rural, small-town, white Anglo-Saxon America. What, however,
of the prospects for liberty? For too many libertarians
mistakenly link the prognosis for liberty with that of the
seemingly stronger and supposedly allied Conservative
movement; this linkage makes the characteristic long-run
pessimism of the modern Libertarian easy to understand. But
this chapter contends that, while the short-run prospects for
liberty at home and abroad may seem dim, the proper attitude
for the Libertarian to take is that of unquenchable longrun
optimism.
The case for this assertion rests on a certain view of history
which holds, first, that before the eighteenth century in
Western Europe there existed (and still continues to exist outside
the West) an identifiable Old Order. Whether the Old
Order took the form of feudalism or Oriental despotism, it was
marked by tyranny, exploitation, stagnation, fixed caste, and
hopelessness and starvation for the bulk of the population. In
sum, life was “nasty, brutish, and short”; here was Maine’s
“society of status” and Spencer’s “military society.” The ruling
classes, or castes, governed by conquest and by getting the
masses to believe in the alleged divine imprimatur to their rule.
The Old Order was, and still remains, the great and
mighty enemy of liberty; and it was particularly mighty in the
past because there was then no inevitability about its overthrow.
When we consider that basically the Old Order had
existed since the dawn of history, in all civilizations, we can
appreciate even more the glory and the magnitude of the triumph
of the liberal revolution of and around the eighteenth
century.
Part of the dimensions of this struggle has been obscured by
a great myth of the history of Western Europe implanted by
antiliberal German historians of the late nineteenth century. The myth held that the growth of absolute monarchies and
of mercantilism in the early modern era was necessary for the
development of capitalism, since these served to liberate the
merchants and the people from local feudal restrictions. In
actuality, this was not at all the case; the king and his
nation–State served rather as a super-feudal overlord reimposing
and reinforcing feudalism just as it was being dissolved
by the peaceful growth of the market economy. The
king superimposed his own restrictions and monopoly privileges
onto those of the feudal regime. The absolute monarchs
were the Old Order writ large and made even more despotic
than before. Capitalism, indeed, flourished earliest and most
actively precisely in those areas where the central State was
weak or nonexistent: the Italian cities, the Hanseatic League,
the confederation of seventeenth-century Holland. Finally,
the Old Order was overthrown or severely shaken in its grip in
two ways. One was by industry and the market expanding
through the interstices of the feudal order (for example, industry
in England developing in the countryside beyond the grip
of feudal, State and guild restrictions). More important was a
series of cataclysmic revolutions that blasted loose the Old
Order and the old ruling classes: the English Revolutions of
the seventeenth century, the American Revolution, and the
French Revolution, all of which were necessary for the ushering
in of the Industrial Revolution and of at least partial
victories for individual liberty, laissez-faire, separation of
church and state, and international peace. The society of status
gave way, at least partially, to the “society of contract”; the
military society gave way partially to the “industrial society.”
The mass of the population now achieved a mobility of labor
and place, and accelerating expansion of their living standards,
for which they had scarcely dared to hope. Liberalism
had indeed brought to the Western world not only liberty,industrial society, but above all, perhaps, it brought hope, a
hope in ever-greater progress that lifted the mass of mankind
out of its age-old sinkhole of stagnation and despair.
Soon there developed in Western Europe two great political
ideologies, centered around this new revolutionary phenomenon:
one was liberalism, the party of hope, of radicalism,
of liberty, of the Industrial Revolution, of progress, of
humanity; the other was conservatism, the party of reaction,
the party that longed to restore the hierarchy, statism, theocracy,
serfdom, and class exploitation of the Old Order. Since
liberalism admittedly had reason on its side, the Conservatives
darkened the ideological atmosphere with obscurantist
calls for romanticism, tradition, theocracy, and irrationalism.
Political ideologies were polarized, with liberalism on the
extreme “left,” and conservatism on the extreme “right,” of the
ideological spectrum. That genuine liberalism was essentially
radical and revolutionary was brilliantly perceived, in the twilight
of its impact, by the great Lord Acton (one of the few figures
in the history of thought who, charmingly, grew more radical
as he grew older). Acton wrote that “Liberalism wishes for
what ought to be, irrespective of what is.” In working out this
view, incidentally, it was Acton, not Trotsky, who first arrived at
the concept of the “permanent revolution.” As Gertrude Himmelfarb
wrote in her excellent study of Acton:
. . . his philosophy develop(ed) to the point where the future
was seen as the avowed enemy of the past, and where the
past was allowed no authority except as it happened to conform
to morality. To take seriously this Liberal theory of
history, to give precedence to “what ought to be” over
“what is,” was, he admitted, virtually to install a “revolution
in permanence.”
The “revolution in permanence,” as Acton hinted in the
inaugural lecture and admitted frankly in his notes, was the
culmination of his philosophy of history and theory of with them the knowledge of good and evil, is the very root
of revolution, for it destroys the sanctity of the past. . . .
“Liberalism is essentially revolutionary,” Acton observed.
“Facts must yield to ideas. Peaceably and patiently if possible.
Violently if not.”1
The Liberal, wrote Acton, far surpassed the Whig:
The Whig governed by compromise. The Liberal begins
the reign of ideas. . . . One is practical, gradual, ready for
compromise. The other works out a principle philosophically.
One is a policy aiming at a philosophy. The other is a
philosophy seeking a policy.2
What happened to liberalism? Why then did it decline
during the nineteenth century? This question has been pondered
many times, but perhaps the basic reason was an inner
rot within the vitals of liberalism itself. For, with the partial
success of the Liberal Revolution in the West, the Liberals
increasingly abandoned their radical fervor and, therefore,
their liberal goals, to rest content with a mere defense of the
uninspiring and defective status quo. Two philosophical roots
of this decay may be discerned. First is the abandonment of
natural rights and “higher law” theory for utilitarianism, for
only forms of natural or higher law theory can provide a radical
base outside the existing system from which to challenge
the status quo; and only such theory furnishes a sense of necessary
immediacy to the libertarian struggle by focusing on
the necessity of bringing existing criminal rulers to the bar of
justice. Utilitarians, on the other hand, in abandoning justice
for expediency, also abandon immediacy for quiet stagnation and inevitably end up as objective apologists for the existing
order.
The second great philosophical influence on the decline
of liberalism was evolutionism, or Social Darwinism, which
put the finishing touches to liberalism as a radical force in
society. For the Social Darwinist erroneously saw history and
society through the peaceful, rose-colored glasses of infinitely
slow, infinitely gradual social evolution. Ignoring the
prime fact that no ruling caste in history has ever voluntarily
surrendered its power, and that, therefore, liberalism had to
break through by means of a series of revolutions, the Social
Darwinists looked forward peacefully and cheerfully to thousands
of years of infinitely gradual evolution to the next supposedly
inevitable stage of individualism.
An interesting illustration of a thinker who embodies
within himself the decline of liberalism in the nineteenth
century is Herbert Spencer. Spencer began as a magnificently
radical liberal, indeed virtually a pure libertarian. But, as the
virus of sociology and Social Darwinism took over in his soul,
Spencer abandoned libertarianism as a dynamic historical
movement, although at first without abandoning it in pure
theory. In short, while looking forward to an eventual ideal of
pure liberty, Spencer began to see its victory as inevitable, but
only after millennia of gradual evolution, and thus, in actual
fact, Spencer abandoned liberalism as a fighting, radical
creed and confined his liberalism in practice to a weary, rearguard
action against the growing collectivism of the late
nineteenth century. Interestingly enough, Spencer’s tired
shift “rightward” in strategy soon became a shift rightward in
theory as well, so that Spencer abandoned pure liberty even in
theory, for example, in repudiating his famous chapter in Social
Statics, “The Right to Ignore the State.” In England, the classical liberals began their shift from
radicalism to quasi-conservatism in the early nineteenth century;
a touchstone of this shift was the general British liberal
attitude toward the national liberation struggle in Ireland.
This struggle was twofold: against British political imperialism
and against feudal landlordism which had been imposed
by that imperialism. By their Tory blindness toward the Irish
drive for national independence, and especially for peasant
property against feudal oppression, the British Liberals
(including Spencer) symbolized their effective abandonment
of genuine liberalism, which had been virtually born in a
struggle against the feudal land system. Only in the United
States, the great home of radical liberalism (where feudalism
had never been able to take root outside the South), did natural
rights and higher-law theory, and consequent radical liberal
movements, continue in prominence until the mid-nineteenth
century. In their different ways, the Jacksonian and
Abolitionist movements were the last powerful radical libertarian
movements in American life.3
Thus, with liberalism abandoned from within, there was
no longer a party of hope in the Western world, no longer a
“Left” movement to lead a struggle against the state and
against the unbreached remainder of the Old Order. Into this
gap, into this void created by the drying up of radical liberalism,
there stepped a new movement: socialism. Libertarians
of the present day are accustomed to think of socialism as the
polar opposite of the libertarian creed. But this is a grave mistake,
responsible for a severe ideological disorientation of libertarians
in the present world. As we have seen, conservatism was the polar opposite of liberty; and socialism, while to the
“left” of conservatism, was essentially a confused, middle-ofthe-
road movement. It was, and still is, middle-of-the-road
because it tries to achieve liberal ends by the use of conservative
means.
In short, Russell Kirk, who claims that socialism was the
heir of classical liberalism, and Ronald Hamowy, who sees
socialism as the heir of conservatism, are both right; for the
question is on what aspect of this confused centrist movement
we happen to be focusing. Socialism, like liberalism and
against conservatism, accepted the industrial system and the
liberal goals of freedom, reason, mobility, progress, higher
living standards for the masses, and an end to theocracy and
war; but it tried to achieve these ends by the use of incompatible,
conservative means: statism, central planning, communitarianism,
etc. Or rather, to be more precise, there were
from the beginning two different strands within socialism:
one was the right-wing, authoritarian strand, from Saint-
Simon down, which glorified statism, hierarchy, and collectivism
and which was thus a projection of conservatism trying
to accept and dominate the new industrial civilization.
The other was the left-wing, relatively libertarian strand,
exemplified in their different ways by Marx and Bakunin,
revolutionary and far more interested in achieving the libertarian
goals of liberalism and socialism; but especially the
smashing of the state apparatus to achieve the “withering
away of the State” and the “end of the exploitation of man by
man.” Interestingly enough, the very Marxian phrase, the
“replacement of the government by men by the administration
of things,” can be traced, by a circuitous route, from the
great French radical laissez-faire liberals of the early nineteenth
century, Charles Comte (no relation to Auguste
Comte) and Charles Dunoyer. And so, too, may the concept of the “class struggle”; except that for Dunoyer and Comte
the inherently antithetical classes were not businessmen versus
workers, but the producers in society (including free
businessmen, workers, peasants, etc.) versus the exploiting
classes constituting, and privileged by, the State apparatus.4
Saint-Simon at one time in his confused and chaotic life was
close to Comte and Dunoyer and picked up his class analysis
from them, in the process characteristically getting the whole
thing balled up and converting businessmen on the market, as
well as feudal landlords and others of the State privileged, into
“exploiters.” Marx and Bakunin picked this up from the
Saint-Simonians, and the result gravely misled the whole
left-socialist movement; for, then, in addition to smashing the
repressive State, it became supposedly necessary to smash
private capitalist ownership of the means of production.
Rejecting private property, especially of capital, the left
socialists were then trapped in a crucial inner contradiction:
if the State is to disappear after the revolution (immediately
for Bakunin, gradually “withering” for Marx), then how is the
“collective” to run its property without becoming an enormous
State itself in fact, even if not in name? This was a contradiction
which neither the Marxists nor the Bakuninists
were ever able to resolve.
Having replaced radical liberalism as the party of the
“left,” socialism, by the turn of the twentieth century, fell prey to this inner contradiction. Most socialists (Fabians,
Lassalleans, even Marxists) turned sharply rightward, completely
abandoned the old libertarian goals and ideals of revolution
and the withering away of the State and became cozy
conservatives permanently reconciled to the State, the status
quo, and the whole apparatus of neomercantilism, State
monopoly capitalism, imperialism, and war that was rapidly
being established and riveted on European society at the turn
of the twentieth century. For conservatism, too, had reformed
and regrouped to try to cope with a modern industrial
system and had become a refurbished mercantilism, a regime
of statism, marked by State monopoly privilege, in direct and
indirect forms, to favored capitalists and to quasi-feudal landlords.
The affinity between right socialism and the new conservatism
became very close, the former advocating similar
policies but with a demagogic populist veneer. Thus, the
other side of the coin of imperialism was “social imperialism,”
which Joseph Schumpeter trenchantly defined as “an
imperialism in which the entrepreneurs and other elements
woo the workers by means of social welfare concessions
which appear to depend on the success of export monopolism.”
5
Historians have long recognized the affinity, and the welding
together, of right-wing socialism with conservatism in
Italy and Germany, where the fusion was embodied first in
Bismarckism and then in fascism and national socialism—the latter fulfilling the Conservative program of nationalism,
imperialism, militarism, theocracy, and a right-wing collectivism
that retained and even cemented the rule of the old
privileged classes. But only recently have historians begun to
realize that a similar pattern occurred in England and the
United States. Thus, Bernard Semmel, in his brilliant history
of the social-imperialist movement in England at the turn of
the twentieth century, shows how the Fabian Society welcomed
the rise of the imperialists in England.6 When, in the
mid-1890s, the Liberal Party in England split into the radicals
on the left and the liberal-imperialists on the right, Beatrice
Webb, co-leader of the Fabians, denounced the radicals
as “laissez-faire and anti-imperialists,” while hailing the latter
as “collectivists and imperialists.” An official Fabian manifesto,
Fabianism and the Empire (1900), drawn up by George
Bernard Shaw (who was later, with perfect consistency, to
praise the domestic policies of Stalin and Mussolini and Sir
Oswald Mosley), lauded imperialism and attacked the radicals,
who “still cling to the fixed-frontier ideals of individualist
republicanism (and) noninterference.” In contrast, “a
Great Power . . . must govern (a world empire) in the interests
of civilization as a whole.” After this, the Fabians collaborated
closely with Tories and liberal-imperialists. Indeed, in
late 1902, Sidney and Beatrice Webb established a small,
secret group of brain-trusters, called The Coefficients; as one
of the leading members of this club, the Tory imperialist,
Leopold S. Amery, revealingly wrote:
Sidney and Beatrice Webb were much more concerned
with getting their ideas of the welfare state put into practice
by anyone who might be prepared to help, even on the most modest scale, than with the early triumph of an avowedly
Socialist Party. . . . There was, after all, nothing so very
unnatural, as [Joseph] Chamberlain’s own career had
shown, in a combination of Imperialism in external affairs
with municipal socialism or semi-socialism at home.7
Other members of The Coefficients, who, as Amery wrote,
were to function as “Brain Trusts or General Staff” for the
movement, were: the liberal-imperialist Richard B. Haldane;
the geopolitician Halford J. Mackinder; the Imperialist and
Germanophobe Leopold Maxse, publisher of the National
Review; the Tory socialist and imperialist Viscount Milner;
the naval imperialist Carlyon Bellairs; the famous journalist
J.L. Garvin; Bernard Shaw; Sir Clinton Dawkins, partner of
the Morgan Bank; and Sir Edward Grey, who, at a meeting
of the club first adumbrated the policy of Entente with
France and Russia that was to eventuate in World War I.8
The famous betrayal during World War I of the old ideals of
revolutionary pacifism by the European Socialists, and even
by the Marxists, should have come as no surprise; that each
Socialist Party supported its “own” national government in
the war (with the honorable exception of Eugene Victor Debs’s
Socialist Party in the United States) was the final embodiment
of the collapse of the classic Socialist Left. From then on,
Socialists and quasi-Socialists joined Conservatives in a basic
amalgam, accepting the state and the mixed economy (= neomercantilism
= the welfare state = interventionism = state
monopoly capitalism, merely synonyms for the same essential reality). It was in reaction to this collapse that Lenin broke out
of the Second International to reestablish classic revolutionary
Marxism in a revival of left socialism.
In fact, Lenin, almost without knowing it, accomplished
more than this. It is common knowledge that “purifying”
movements, eager to return to a classic purity shorn of recent
corruptions, generally purify further than what had held true
among the original classic sources. There were, indeed,
marked “conservative” strains in the writings of Marx and
Engels themselves which often justified the State, Western
imperialism, and aggressive nationalism, and it was these
motifs, in the ambivalent views of the masters on this subject,
that provided the fodder for the later shift of the majority
Marxists into the “social imperialist” camp.9 Lenin’s camp
turned more “left” than had Marx and Engels themselves.
Lenin had a decidedly more revolutionary stance toward the
State and consistently defended and supported movements of
national liberation against imperialism. The Leninist shift
was more “leftist” in other important senses as well. For
while Marx had centered his attack on market capitalism per
se, the major focus of Lenin’s concerns was on what he conceived
to be the highest stages of capitalism: imperialism and
monopoly. Hence Lenin’s focus, centering as it did in practice
on State monopoly and imperialism rather than on laissezfaire
capitalism, was in that way far more congenial to the
Libertarian than that of Karl Marx.
Fascism and Nazism were the local culmination in domestic
affairs of the modern drift toward right-wing collectivism. It
has become customary among libertarians, as indeed among the Establishment of the West, to regard fascism and communism
as fundamentally identical. But while both systems
were indubitably collectivist, they differed greatly in their
socioeconomic content. Communism was a genuine revolutionary
movement that ruthlessly displaced and overthrew
the old ruling elites, while fascism, on the contrary, cemented
into power the old ruling classes. Hence, fascism was a counterrevolutionary
movement that froze a set of monopoly privileges
upon society; in short, fascism was the apotheosis of
modern State monopoly capitalism.10 Here was the reason that fascism proved so attractive (which communism, of
course, never did) to big business interests in the West—
openly and unabashedly so in the 1920s and early 1930s.11
We are now in a position to apply our analysis to the
American scene. Here we encounter a contrasting myth
about recent American history which has been propagated by
current conservatives and adopted by most American libertarians.
The myth goes approximately as follows: America
was, more or less, a haven of laissez-faire until the New Deal;
then Roosevelt, influenced by Felix Frankfurter, the Intercollegiate
Socialist Society, and other “Fabian” and communist
“conspirators,” engineered a revolution which set America
on the path to socialism, and further on beyond the horizon,
to communism. The present-day libertarian who adopts
this or a similar view of the American experience, tends to
think of himself as an “extreme right-winger”; slightly to the
left of him, then, stands the conservative, to the left of that
the middle-of-the-road, and then leftward to socialism and
communism. Hence, the enormous temptation for some libertarians to red-bait; for, since they see America as drifting
inexorably leftward to socialism and, therefore, to communism,
the great temptation is for them to overlook the intermediary
stages and tar all of their opposition with the hated
Red brush.
One would think that the “right-wing Libertarian” would
quickly be able to see some drastic flaws in this conception.
For one thing, the income tax amendment, which he
deplores as the beginning of socialism in America, was put
through Congress in 1909 by an overwhelming majority of
both parties. To look at this event as a sharp leftward move
toward socialism would require treating President William
Howard Taft, who put through the Sixteenth Amendment, as
a Leftist, and surely few would have the temerity to do that.
Indeed, the New Deal was not a revolution in any sense; its
entire collectivist program was anticipated: proximately by
Herbert Hoover during the depression, and, beyond that, by
the war-collectivism and central planning that governed
America during World War I. Every element in the New
Deal program: central planning, creation of a network of
compulsory cartels for industry and agriculture, inflation
and credit expansion, artificial raising of wage rates and promotion
of unions within the overall monopoly structure,
government regulation and ownership, all this had been
anticipated and adumbrated during the previous two
decades.12 And this program, with its privileging of various
big business interests at the top of the collectivist heap, was
in no sense reminiscent of socialism or leftism; there was
nothing smacking of the egalitarian or the proletarian here.
No, the kinship of this burgeoning collectivism was not at all with socialism–communism but with fascism, or socialism-ofthe-
right, a kinship which many big businessmen of the twenties
expressed openly in their yearning for abandonment of a
quasi-laissez-faire system for a collectivism which they could
control. And, surely, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson,
and Herbert Clark Hoover make far more recognizable
figures as proto-Fascists than they do as crypto-communists.
The essence of the New Deal was seen, far more clearly
than in the Conservative mythology, by the Leninist movement
in the early 1930s; that is, until the mid-thirties, when
the exigencies of Soviet foreign relations caused a sharp shift
of the world communist line to “Popular Front” approval of
the New Deal. Thus, in 1934, the British Leninist theoretician
R. Palme Dutt published a brief but scathing analysis of
the New Deal as “social fascism”—as the reality of fascism
cloaked with a thin veneer of populist demagogy. No Conservative
opponent has ever delivered a more vigorous or
trenchant denunciation of the New Deal. The Roosevelt policy,
wrote Dutt, was to “move to a form of dictatorship of a
war-type”; the essential policies were to impose a State
monopoly capitalism through the NRA, to subsidize business,
banking, and agriculture through inflation and the partial
expropriation of the mass of the people through lower
real-wage rates and to the regulation and exploitation of labor
by means of government-fixed wages and compulsory arbitration.
When the New Deal, wrote Dutt, is stripped of its “socialreformist
‘progressive’ camouflage,” “the reality of the new
Fascist type of system of concentrated State capitalism and
industrial servitude remains,” including an implicit “advance to
war.” Dutt effectively concluded with a quote from an editor of
the highly respected Current History Magazine: American fascism, embodying the experience, the traditions,
and the hopes of a great middle-class nation.13
Thus, the New Deal was not a qualitative break from the
American past; on the contrary, it was merely a quantitative
extension of the web of State privilege that had been proposed
and acted upon before: in Hoover’s administration, in
the war collectivism of World War I, and in the Progressive
Era. The most thorough exposition of the origins of State
monopoly capitalism, or what he calls “political capitalism,”
in the United States is found in the brilliant work of Dr.
Gabriel Kolko. In The Triumph of Conservatism, Kolko traces
the origins of political capitalism in the “reforms” of the Progressive
Era. Orthodox historians have always treated the
Progressive period (roughly 1900–1916) as a time when freemarket
capitalism was becoming increasingly “monopolistic”;
in reaction to this reign of monopoly and big business,
so the story runs, altruistic intellectuals and far-seeing politicians
turned to intervention by the government to reform
and to regulate these evils. Kolko’s great work demonstrates
that the reality was almost precisely the opposite of this
myth. Despite the wave of mergers and trusts formed around
the turn of the century, Kolko reveals, the forces of competition
on the free market rapidly vitiated and dissolved these
attempts at stabilizing and perpetuating the economic power
of big business interests. It was precisely in reaction to their
impending defeat at the hands of the competitive storms of
the market that big business turned, increasingly after the
1900s, to the federal government for aid and protection. In
short, the intervention by the federal government was designed, not to curb big business monopoly for the sake of
the public weal, but to create monopolies that big business
(as well as trade associations of smaller business) had not
been able to establish amidst the competitive gales of the free
market. Both left and right have been persistently misled by
the notion that intervention by the government is ipso facto
leftish and antibusiness. Hence the mythology of the New-
Fair Deal-as-Red that is endemic on the right. Both the big
businessmen, led by the Morgan interests, and Professor
Kolko, almost uniquely in the academic world, have realized
that monopoly privilege can only be created by the State and
not as a result of free-market operations.
Thus, Kolko shows that, beginning with Theodore Roosevelt’s
New Nationalism and culminating in Wilson’s New
Freedom, in industry after industry, for example, insurance,
banking, meat, exports and business generally, regulations
that present-day rightists think of as “socialistic” were not
only uniformly hailed, but conceived and brought about by
big businessmen. This was a conscious effort to fasten upon
the economy a cement of subsidy, stabilization, and monopoly
privilege. A typical view was that of Andrew Carnegie;
deeply concerned about competition in the steel industry,
which neither the formation of U.S. Steel nor the famous
“Gary Dinners” sponsored by that Morgan company could
dampen, Carnegie declared in 1908 that “it always comes
back to me that government control, and that alone, will
properly solve the problem.” There is nothing alarming
about government regulation per se, announced Carnegie,
“capital is perfectly safe in the gas company, although it is
under court control. So will all capital be, although under
government control. The Progressive Party, Kolko shows, was basically a Morgan-
created party to reelect Roosevelt and punish President
Taft, who had been overzealous in prosecuting Morgan enterprises,
the leftish social workers often unwittingly provided a
demagogic veneer for a conservative–statist movement. Wilson’s
New Freedom, culminating in the creation of the Federal
Trade Commission, far from being considered dangerously
socialistic by big business, was welcomed enthusiastically
as putting their long-cherished program of support,
privilege, and regulation of competition into effect (and Wilson’s
war collectivism was welcomed even more exuberantly).
Edward N. Hurley, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission
and formerly president of the Illinois Manufacturers
Association, happily announced in late 1915, that the Federal
Trade Commission was designed “to do for general business”
what the ICC had been eagerly doing for the railroads and
shippers, what the Federal Reserve was doing for the nation’s
bankers, and what the Department of Agriculture was
accomplishing for the farmers.15 As would happen more dramatically
in European fascism, each economic interest group
was being cartelized and monopolized and fitted into its
privileged niche in a hierarchically-ordered socioeconomic structure. Particularly influential were the views of Arthur
Jerome Eddy, an eminent corporation lawyer who specialized
in forming trade associations and who helped to father the
Federal Trade Commission. In his magnum opus fiercely
denouncing competition in business and calling for governmentally-
controlled and protected industrial “cooperation,”
Eddy trumpeted that “Competition is War, and ‘War is
Hell’.”16
What of the intellectuals of the Progressive period,
damned by the present-day Right as “socialistic”? Socialistic
in a sense they were, but what kind of “socialism”? The conservative
state socialism of Bismarck’s Germany, the prototype
for so much of modern European—and American—
political forms, and under which the bulk of American intellectuals
of the late nineteenth century received their higher
education. As Kolko puts it:
The conservatism of the contemporary intellectuals . . . the
idealization of the state by Lester Ward, Richard T. Ely, or
Simon N. Patten . . . was also the result of the peculiar
training of many of the American academics of this period.
At the end of the nineteenth century the primary influence
in American academic social and economic theory was
exerted by the universities. The Bismarckian idealization of
the state, with its centralized welfare functions . . . was suitably
revised by the thousands of key academics who studied
in German universities in the 1880s and 1890s.17
The ideal of the leading ultraconservative German professors,
moreover, who were also called “socialists of the chair,” was consciously to form themselves into the “intellectual
bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern”—and that they
surely were.
As an exemplar of the Progressive intellectual, Kolko aptly
cites Herbert Croly, editor of the Morgan-financed New
Republic. Systematizing Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism,
Croly hailed this new Hamiltonianism as a system for
collectivist federal control and integration of society into a
hierarchical structure. Looking forward from the Progressive
Era, Gabriel Kolko concludes that:
a synthesis of business and politics on the federal level was
created during the war, in various administrative and emergency
agencies, that continued throughout the following
decade. Indeed, the war period represents the triumph of
business in the most emphatic manner possible . . . big business
gained total support from the various regulatory agencies
and the Executive. It was during the war that effective,
working oligopoly and price and market agreements
became operational in the dominant sectors of the American
economy. The rapid diffusion of power in the economy
and relatively easy entry virtually ceased. Despite the cessation
of important new legislative enactments, the unity of
business and the federal government continued throughout
the 1920s and thereafter, using the foundations laid in the
Progressive Era to stabilize and consolidate conditions
within various industries. . . . The principle of utilizing the
federal government to stabilize the economy, established in
the context of modern industrialism during the Progressive
Era, became the basis of political capitalism in its many
later ramifications.
In this sense progressivism did not die in the 1920s, but
became a part of the basic fabric of American society.18
Thus the New Deal. After a bit of leftish wavering in the
middle of the late thirties, the Roosevelt administration recemented
its alliance with big business in the national defense and war contract economy that began in 1940. This is an
economy and a polity that has been ruling America ever
since, embodied in the permanent war economy, the fullfledged
State monopoly capitalism and neomercantilism, the
military–industrial complex of the present era. The essential
features of American society have not changed since it was
thoroughly militarized and politicized in World War II—
except that the trends intensify, and even in everyday life men
have been increasingly molded into conforming organization
men serving the State and its military–industrial complex.
William H. Whyte, Jr., in his justly famous book, The Organization
Man, made clear that this molding took place amidst
the adoption by business of the collectivist views of “enlightened”
sociologists and other social engineers. It is also clear
that this harmony of views is not simply the result of naïveté
by big businessmen—not when such “naïveté” coincides with
the requirements of compressing the worker and manager
into the mold of willing servitor in the great bureaucracy of
the military–industrial machine. And, under the guise of
“democracy,” education has become mere mass drilling in the
techniques of adjustment to the task of becoming a cog in the
vast bureaucratic machine.
Meanwhile, the Republicans and Democrats remain as
bipartisan in forming and supporting this establishment as they
were in the first two decades of the twentieth century. “Metooism”—
bipartisan support of the status quo that underlies
the superficial differences between the parties—did not begin
in 1940.
How did the corporal’s guard of remaining libertarians
react to these shifts of the ideological spectrum in America?
An instructive answer may be found by looking at the career
of one of the great libertarians of twentieth-century America—
Albert Jay Nock. In the 1920s, when Nock had formulated his radical libertarian philosophy, he was universally regarded as
a member of the extreme Left, and he so regarded himself as
well. It is always the tendency, in ideological and political life,
to center one’s attention on the main enemy of the day, and
the main enemy of that day was the conservative statism of
the Coolidge-Hoover administration; it was natural, therefore,
for Nock, his friend and fellow-libertarian H.L.
Mencken and other radicals to join quasi-Socialists in battle
against the common foe. When the New Deal succeeded
Hoover, on the other hand, the milk-and-water socialists and
vaguely leftish Interventionists hopped on the New Deal
bandwagon; on the Left only the Libertarians such as Nock
and Mencken and the Leninists (before the Popular Front
period) realized that Roosevelt was only a continuation of
Hoover in other rhetoric. It was perfectly natural for the radicals
to form a united front against Roosevelt with the older
Hoover and Al Smith conservatives who either believed Roosevelt
had gone too far or disliked his flamboyant populistic
rhetoric. But the problem was that Nock and his fellow radicals,
at first properly scornful of their newfound allies, soon
began to accept them and even don cheerfully the formerly
despised label of “Conservative.” With the rank-and-file radicals,
this shift took place, as have so many transformations of
ideology in history, unwittingly and in default of proper ideological
leadership; for Nock, and to some extent for
Mencken, on the other hand, the problem cut far deeper.
For there had always been one grave flaw in the brilliant
and finely-honed libertarian doctrine hammered out in their
very different ways by Nock and Mencken; both had long
adopted the great error of pessimism. Both saw no hope for
the human race ever adopting the system of liberty; despairing
of the radical doctrine of liberty ever being applied in
practice, each in his own personal way retreated from the responsibility of ideological leadership, Mencken joyously
and hedonically, Nock haughtily and secretively. Despite the
massive contribution of both men to the cause of liberty,
therefore, neither could ever become the conscious leader of
a libertarian movement, for neither could ever envision the
party of liberty as the party of hope, the party of revolution,
or a fortiori, the party of secular messianism. The error of
pessimism is the first step down the slippery slope that leads
to conservatism; and hence it was all too easy for the pessimistic
radical Nock, even though still basically a Libertarian,
to accept the conservative label and even come to croak
the old platitude that there is an a priori presumption against
any social change.
It is fascinating that Albert Jay Nock thus followed the
ideological path of his beloved spiritual ancestor Herbert
Spencer, both began as pure radical Libertarians, both
quickly abandoned radical or revolutionary tactics as embodied
in the will to put their theories into practice through mass
action, and both eventually glided from Tory tactics to at
least a partial toryism of content.
And so the Libertarians, especially in their sense of where
they stood in the ideological spectrum, fused with the older
Conservatives who were forced to adopt libertarian phraseology
(but with no real libertarian content) in opposing a Roosevelt
administration that had become too collectivistic for
them, either in content or in rhetoric. World War II reinforced
and cemented this alliance; for, in contrast to all the
previous American wars of the century, the pro-peace and
“isolationist” forces were all identified, by their enemies and
subsequently by themselves, as men of the “Right.” By the
end of World War II, it was second nature for libertarians to
consider themselves at an “extreme right-wing” pole with the
Conservatives immediately to the left of them; and hence the great error of the spectrum that persists to this day. In particular,
the modern libertarians forgot or never realized that
opposition to war and militarism had always been a “leftwing”
tradition which had included Libertarians; and hence
when the historical aberration of the New Deal period corrected
itself and the “right-wing” was once again the great
partisan of total war, the Libertarians were unprepared to
understand what was happening and tailed along in the wake
of their supposed conservative “allies.” The liberals had completely
lost their old ideological markings and guidelines.
Given a proper reorientation of the ideological spectrum,
what then would be the prospects for liberty? It is no wonder
that the contemporary Libertarian, seeing the world going
socialistic and communistic, and believing himself virtually
isolated and cut off from any prospect of united mass action,
tends to be steeped in long-run pessimism. But the scene
immediately brightens when we realize that that indispensable
requisite of modern civilization—the overthrow of the
Old Order—was accomplished by mass libertarian action
erupting in such great revolutions of the West as the French
and American Revolutions, and bringing about the glories of
the Industrial Revolution and the advances of liberty, mobility,
and rising living standards that we still retain today.
Despite the reactionary swings backward to statism, the
modern world stands towering above the world of the past.
When we consider also that, in one form or another, the Old
Order of despotism, feudalism, theocracy, and militarism
dominated every human civilization until the West of the
eighteenth century, optimism over what man has and can
achieve must mount still higher.
It might be retorted, however, that this bleak historical
record of despotism and stagnation only reinforces pessimism,
for it shows the persistence and durability of the Old Order and the seeming frailty and evanescence of the New—
especially in view of the retrogression of the past century. But
such superficial analysis neglects the great change that
occurred with the revolution of the New Order, a change
that is clearly irreversible. For the Old Order was able to
persist in its slave system for centuries precisely because it
awoke no expectations and no hopes in the minds of the submerged
masses; their lot was to live and eke out their brutish
subsistence in slavery while obeying unquestioningly the
commands of their divinely appointed rulers. But the liberal
revolution implanted indelibly in the minds of the masses—
not only in the West but in the still feudally-dominated undeveloped
world—the burning desire for liberty, for land to the
peasantry, for peace between the nations, and, perhaps above
all, for the mobility and rising standards of living that can only
be brought to them by an industrial civilization. The masses
will never again accept the mindless serfdom of the Old
Order; and given these demands that have been awakened by
liberalism and the Industrial Revolution, long-run victory for
liberty is inevitable.
For only liberty, only a free market, can organize and
maintain an industrial system, and the more that population
expands and explodes, the more necessary is the unfettered
working of such an industrial economy. Laissez-faire and the
free market become more and more evidently necessary as an
industrial system develops; radical deviations cause breakdowns
and economic crises. This crisis of statism becomes
particularly dramatic and acute in a fully socialist society; and
hence the inevitable breakdown of statism has first become
strikingly apparent in the countries of the socialist (that is,
communist) camp. For socialism confronts its inner contradiction
most starkly. Desperately, it tries to fulfill its proclaimed
goals of industrial growth, higher standards of living
for the masses, and eventual withering away of the State and Hence the inevitable breakdown of socialism. This progressive
breakdown of socialist planning was at first partially
obscured. For, in every instance, the Leninists took power
not in a developed capitalist country as Marx had wrongly
predicted, but in a country suffering from the oppression of
feudalism. Second, the Communists did not attempt to impose
socialism upon the economy for many years after taking
power; in Soviet Russia until Stalin’s forced collectivization
of the early 1930s reversed the wisdom of Lenin’s New Economic
Policy, which Lenin’s favorite theoretician, Bukharin,
would have extended onward towards a free market. Even the
supposedly rabid Communist leaders of China did not
impose a socialist economy on that country until the late
1950s. In every case, growing industrialization has imposed a
series of economic breakdowns so severe that the communist
countries, against their ideological principles, have had to
retreat step by step from central planning and return to various
degrees and forms of a free market. The Liberman Plan
for the Soviet Union has gained a great deal of publicity; but
the inevitable process of desocialization has proceeded much
further in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. Most
advanced of all is Yugoslavia, which, freed from Stalinist
rigidity earlier than its fellows, in only a dozen years has desocialized
so fast and so far that its economy is now hardly
more socialistic than that of France. The fact that people calling
themselves “communists” are still governing the country is
irrelevant to the basic social and economic facts. Central planning
in Yugoslavia has virtually disappeared. The private sector
not only predominates in agriculture but is even strong in
industry, and the public sector itself has been so radically
decentralized and placed under free pricing, profit-and-loss
tests and a cooperative worker–ownership of each plant that
true socialism hardly exists any longer. Only the final step of
converting workers’ syndical control to individual shares of Communist China and the able Marxist theoreticians of
Monthly Review have clearly discerned the situation and have
raised the alarm that Yugoslavia is no longer a socialist country.
One would think that free-market economists would hail
the confirmation and increasing relevance of the notable
insight of Professor Ludwig von Mises a half-century ago:
that socialist states, being necessarily devoid of a genuine
price system, could not calculate economically and, therefore,
could not plan their economies with any success.
Indeed, one follower of Mises, in effect, predicted this
process of desocialization in a novel some years ago. Yet neither
this author nor other free-market economists have given
the slightest indication of even recognizing, let alone saluting,
this process in the communist countries—perhaps
because their almost hysterical view of the alleged threat of
communism prevents them from acknowledging any dissolution
in the supposed monolith of menace.19
Communist countries, therefore, are increasingly and
ineradicably forced to desocialize and will, therefore, eventually
reach the free market. The state of the undeveloped
countries is also cause for sustained libertarian optimism. For all over the world, the peoples of the undeveloped nations are
engaged in revolution to throw off their feudal Old Order. It
is true that the United States is doing its mightiest to suppress
the very revolutionary process that once brought it and
Western Europe out of the shackles of the Old Order; but it
is increasingly clear that even overwhelming armed might
cannot suppress the desire of the masses to break through
into the modern world.
We are left with the United States and the countries of
Western Europe. Here, the case for optimism is less clear, for
the quasi-collectivist system does not present as stark a crisis
of self-contradiction as does socialism. And yet, here, too,
economic crisis looms in the future and gnaws away at the
complacency of the Keynesian economic managers: creeping
inflation, reflected in the aggravating balance-of-payments
breakdown of the once almighty dollar; creeping secular
unemployment brought about by minimum wage scales; and
the deeper and long-run accumulation of the uneconomic distortions
of the permanent war economy. Moreover, potential
crises in the United States are not merely economic; there is a
burgeoning and inspiring moral ferment among the youth of
America against the fetters of centralized bureaucracy, of mass
education in uniformity, and of brutality and oppression exercised
by the minions of the State.
Furthermore, the maintenance of a substantial degree of
free speech and democratic forms facilitates, at least in the
short run, the possible growth of a libertarian movement. The
United States is also fortunate in possessing, even if half-forgotten
beneath the statist and tyrannical overlay of the last
half-century, a great tradition of libertarian thought and
action. The very fact that much of this heritage is still reflected
in popular rhetoric, even though stripped of its significance in
practice, provides a substantial ideological groundwork for a
future party of liberty. What the Marxists would call the “objective conditions”
for the triumph of liberty exist, then, everywhere in the
world and more so than in any past age; for everywhere the
masses have opted for higher living standards and the promise
of freedom and everywhere the various regimes of statism and
collectivism cannot fulfill these goals. What is needed, then, is
simply the “subjective conditions” for victory; that is, a growing
body of informed libertarians who will spread the message
to the peoples of the world that liberty and the purely free
market provide the way out of their problems and crises. Liberty
cannot be fully achieved unless libertarians exist in number
to guide the peoples to the proper path. But perhaps the
greatest stumbling block to the creation of such a movement
is the despair and pessimism typical of the Libertarian in
today’s world. Much of that pessimism is due to his misreading
of history and his thinking of himself and his handful of
confreres as irredeemably isolated from the masses and,
therefore, from the winds of history. Hence he becomes a
lone critic of historical events rather than a person who considers
himself as part of a potential movement which can and
will make history. The modern Libertarian has forgotten that
the Liberal of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries faced
odds much more overwhelming than those which face the
Liberal of today; for in that era before the Industrial Revolution,
the victory of liberalism was far from inevitable. And yet
the liberalism of that day was not content to remain a gloomy
little sect; instead, it unified theory and action. Liberalism
grew and developed as an ideology and, leading and guiding
the masses, made the revolution which changed the fate of the
world. By its monumental breakthrough, this revolution of the
eighteenth century transformed history from a chronicle of
stagnation and despotism to an ongoing movement advancing
toward a veritable secular utopia of liberty and rationality and
abundance. The Old Order is dead or moribund; and the reactionary attempts to run a modern society and economy
by various throwbacks to the Old Order are doomed to total
failure. The Liberals of the past have left to modern Libertarians
a glorious heritage, not only of ideology but of victories
against far more devastating odds. The Liberals of the
past have also left a heritage of the proper strategy and tactics
for libertarians to follow, not only by leading rather than
remaining aloof from the masses, but also by not falling prey
to short-run optimism. For short-run optimism, being unrealistic,
leads straightway to disillusion and then to long-run
pessimism; just as, on the other side of the coin, long-run
pessimism leads to exclusive and self-defeating concentration
on immediate and short-run issues. Short-run optimism
stems, for one thing, from a naive and simplistic view of strategy:
that liberty will win merely by educating more intellectuals,
who in turn will educate opinion-molders, who in turn
will convince the masses, after which the State will somehow
fold its tent and silently steal away. Matters are not that easy.
For libertarians face not only a problem of education but also
a problem of power, and it is a law of history that a ruling
caste has never voluntarily given up its power.
But the problem of power is, certainly in the United
States, far in the future. For the Libertarian, the main task of
the present epoch is to cast off his needless and debilitating
pessimism, to set his sights on long-run victory and to set out
on the road to its attainment. To do this, he must, perhaps
first of all, drastically realign his mistaken view of the ideological
spectrum; he must discover who his friends and natural
allies are, and above all perhaps, who his enemies are.
Armed with this knowledge, let him proceed in the spirit of
radical long-run optimism that one of the great figures in the
history of libertarian thought, Randolph Bourne, correctly
identified as the spirit of youth. Let Bourne’s stirring words
serve also as the guidepost for the spirit of liberty: [Y]outh is the incarnation of reason pitted against the rigidity
of tradition; youth puts the remorseless questions to
everything that is old and established—Why? What is this
thing good for? And when it gets the mumbled, evasive
answers of the defenders it applies its own fresh, clean spirit
of reason to institutions, customs and ideas and finding
them stupid, inane or poisonous, turns instinctively to overthrow
them and build in their place the things with which
its visions teem. . . .
Youth is the leaven that keeps all these questioning, testing
attitudes fermenting in the world. If it were not for this
troublesome activity of youth, with its hatred of sophisms
and glosses, its insistence on things as they are, society
would die from sheer decay. It is the policy of the older generation
as it gets adjusted to the world to hide away the
unpleasant things where it can, or preserve a conspiracy of
silence and an elaborate pretense that they do not exist. But
meanwhile the sores go on festering just the same. Youth is
the drastic antiseptic. . . . It drags skeletons from closets and
insists that they be explained. No wonder the older generation
fears and distrusts the younger. Youth is the avenging
Nemesis on its trail. . . .
Our elders are always optimistic in their views of the
present, pessimistic in their views of the future; youth is
pessimistic toward the present and gloriously hopeful for
the future. And it is this hope which is the lever of
progress—one might say, the only lever of progress. . . .
The secret of life is then that this fine youthful spirit shall
never be lost. Out of the turbulence of youth should come
this fine precipitate—a sane, strong, aggressive spirit of daring
and doing. It must be a flexible, growing spirit, with a
hospitality to new ideas and a keen insight into experience.
To keep one’s reactions warm and true is to have found the
secret of perpetual youth, and perpetual youth is salvation.

- Murray N. Rothbard

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‘BORDERLINES’?

2011-02-28T05:51:00.000-08:00

The borderline diagnosis has been used more and more frequently since the 1970s. This is an undisputed fact. There is an increase in the number of patients who are presenting the four fundamental characteristics of this syndrome which conform to the specifications laid down by Grinker in 1968 according to statistical evaluations:

— aggressiveness and tendency to anger,

— problems with affective relations, which are anaclitic, dependent or complementary, but rarely reciprocal,

— problems with identity,

— feelings of depression, not melancholic but more linked with a solitary life.1

The divergencies between clinicians does not focus on the recording of the phenomenon of increase of the syndrome, they begin when it comes to looking into its reasoning and its interpretation. The most common explanation proposed puts forward the progress of knowledge about psychic functioning which allows the isolation of an illness hitherto ignored. It is a seductive, optimistic argument which smoothes the progress of science. It is not ours. An immediate observation allows us to doubt it: as far as the nature of this illness is concerned, its principle theoreticians are in fundamental disagreement: for Kernberg borderline is a stable organisation, for Bergeret it is an astructural state. We will add that Kohut denies the existence of a borderline organisation but distinguishes, in the same clinical field, on one side psychoses and borderline cases, on the other side narcissistic personalities, which develop specific forms of transference.2 To recap, some take the borderline state to be a larval psychosis, others to be an undifferentiated state, while yet others take it to be an atypical neurosis. Such divergences on essential points do not very well support the thesis of the emergence of the borderline state as a result of the progress of knowledge about psychic functioning

In fact several factors seem to be brought in which favour the abandonment of the concept. First a schematic history of the term. The term ‘borderline’ appeared in 1884 in an article Alienist and Neurologist written by M. Hugues. It describes ‘a frontier state of madness’. The notion did not respond to a true conceptual need and was consequently forgotten. The subsequent introduction of the neurosis-psychosis differentiation, produced in its essentials by Freud’s teaching, constitutes a period of relative silence on the question of their limits. If there are debates about them they are rather in relation to the definition of the concept of schizophrenia. The lack of precision in the Bleulerian3 notion gave rise to a profusion of nosological innovations on its fringes: schizoid; schizothymia, schizomania, schizosis, schizoneurosis, benign forms of schizophrenia, schizosthenia, apsychotic schizophrenia, schizonoia, larval schizophrenia, etc.

The birth of the modern concept of the borderline is immediately posterior to the death of Freud. It came from to two American psychoanalysts, Adolf Stern and Victor Eisenstein, who wanted to discover certain limits in Freudian psychoanalysis with certain unanalysable patients who were nevertheless not psychotic. We will come back to this.

Some years later came the discovery of neuroleptics. In often succeeding in reducing delusions, hallucinations and disturbances, these new medications profoundly modified the psychotic symptomatology, so that the number of patients cared for outside the hospital increased considerably. The accent placed on the limit was displaced, while the first authors proceeded from the limits of neuroses encountered in analytic treatment, the effectiveness of neuroleptics shifted attention onto a new clinic of patients placed on the frontiers of psychosis.

It was between 1967 and 1971 that many psychoanalysts in the USA and in France gave more weight to the borderline concept and that of the narcissistic personality, endeavouring to confer on them a metapsychological consistency (Kernberg,4 Bergeret,5 Kohut). Their work met a considerable echo; since then research has multiplied.

At the end of this century, the borderline state remains a diagnosis in frequent use. If this is not because of the pertinence of the constructions which support the concept, how can its lasting success be explained? Three major givens seem to be able to throw light onto the phenomenon: rapid development of biological therapies, which smooth defensive constructions, the considerable restriction of the field of hysteria and the misunderstanding of un-triggered psychotic structure. Each contributes in its way, as we will try to show, to making a place for the borderline.

The principle characteristics of this concept rest on a wide and poorly defined semiological description, in such a way that nothing really prevents its demolition. Certain authors consider that it is within the borderline states that distinctions must be established: thus for Rinker (1968) the line between neurosis and psychosis must itself be divided into four sub-types: from those closest to psychosis to those which can be confined to neurosis. Others discover original forms, for example considering drug-addiction as ‘a borderline state within the borderline state’.6 Still others introduce new concepts into the same clinical field: pure psychosis (Donnet, Green), marginal psychosis (Pankow), narcissistic personality (Kohut), etc.

An evolution can be clearly seen in the approach to the problem which shifts the limit: initially very close to neurosis, it is found today to be situated more and more within the confines of psychosis. Nevertheless, while this tendency is dominant, widely varying points of view co-exist. Some hold the borderline to be a pseudo-neurotic form of schizophrenia, others opt for a form of neurosis with psychotic mechanisms; not to resolve the issue, one could go with Kohut on the pivotal point of narcissistic transference. Or again we could prefer the position of those who challenge all notions of structural exclusion between neurosis and psychosis in such a way that there exists a dynamic equilibrium between psychotic processes and neurotic processes, allowing all patients to be situated along a continuum in the mental processes. In short, it is not because of its coherence, even in the hearts of those who insist that the concept is well-founded, that the theory of borderline states is remarkable. Even an author such as Green, who, while he does not challenge the notion, has to comment on it: he writes in 1976, after having consulted the specialist dictionaries, “the limits are not all situated in the same places by the different writers, who nevertheless are supposed to be competent in the matter”.7 Some years later, in 1981, one of his colleagues made a similar observation: “to the extent that the success of the term is affirmed”, writes Widlöcher, “one has seen its meaning become imprecise, confused, even contradictory. In fact one could speak of a plurality of concepts which certainly cover a widely recognised clinical reality, but while using criteria so different that the definition of this new category loses its precision to the extent that the clinical studies, the etiological hypotheses ad the psychopathological theories multiply themselves. It is therefore necessary to speak of concepts, in the plural, of borderline states”.8

Since then, even in the Anglo-Saxon field, clinicians have emerged who challenge such a vague notion. For example in an article that appeared in 1978 in The American journal of Psychiatry, Rich proposes that patients with uncertain diagnoses be called ‘undiagnosed patients’, rather than making them into borderline subjects for the sake of convenience. Similarly in 1989 Wurmser refutes the concept of borderline cases because “it is a catch-all term which covers very varied areas of psychopathology”.9 In 1974 Flournoy thinks that the borderline problems correspond either to a latent psychosis tangled with modes of neurotic defence, or to a neurosis bearing some surface psychotic symptoms.10 Laplanche and Pontalis, in The Language of Psychoanalysis consider that the term borderline does not possess a rigorous nosographic meaning. They consider that, depending on the concepts of different authors, mainly schizophrenics presenting neurotic symptomatology, but also psychopathic, perverse, and delinquent personalities and serious neurotic cases are included in this notion.

How could such a blurred concept as that of borderline know the development that we acknowledge it? Let us remember that there is a precedent, that of schizophrenia, which shows that the indeterminateness of a concept is not an obstacle to its success as far as clinicians are concerned. Is it a lack of rigour on their part? Or do they consider it advantageous to use jumbled notions in order not to shut the patient into a category which is too constraining?

The rise of the borderlines.

Let us return to the period in which the modern concept of borderline originated. A little after the death of the founder of psychoanalysis a number of analysts, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon sphere, noticed an increasing number of patients who balked at adapting to the type of treatment in which the accent placed on the interpretation of material is diminished in favour of the analysis of resistances. Seriousness of regression, depth of narcissism, weakness of the ego, the importance of the schizoid factor, the explanations differ but the opinions converge in relation to the scarcity of the signs of psychoanalysis. In any case, until the 50s Freud’s teaching was still too present to allow any doubt in relation to the hysteric’s ability to gain from analytic treatment to emerge. Thus the classic Treaty of Freudian psychology published by Fenichel for the use of students in a hurry, while to a certain extent it does efface hysteria, it nevertheless considers “the best therapeutic results” to be obtained from it.11 Unanalysable subjects were not yet to be found among hysterics.

Things were soon to change. Various factors contributed of which the principal ones were the extension of the field of psychosis, the introduction of the notion of unanalysability, the growth of the concept of borderline, and the development of chemical therapies. We must emphasise that these phenomena appeared simultaneously in the 50s. One of their consequences lies in the fact that they all contributed to re-evaluations of hysteria — always reducing it.

During this period the spreading of the work of M. Klein and the translation into English of the major works of Bleuler are influential in a way that converges with Fairburn’s work on the schizoid factors, producing a disproportionate extension of the psychotic mechanisms across the Atlantic. Leaning on these researches, anyone feels able to proceed to a re-evaluation of the cases presented by Freud and Breuer in 1895 in their Studies on Hysteria. It is in San Francisco that a respected representative of Ego-psychology takes it upon herself. Reichard does not hesitate: Anna O. and Emmy von N. were schizophrenics. She founds this diagnosis on various criteria which share a common reference to a vague notion of accentuated seriousness. Comparing them with three of Freud’s other major cases, she concludes that these two patients came from more disturbed families, that their symptoms were more numerous, that the results of their treatment was less good, and above all that the weakness of their egos produced a decisive differentiation. Hysteria, according to her, is a neurosis characterised by conversion symptoms which derive from unresolved Oedipal desires. She finds persistent sexual conflicts on the phallic or genital level which can only be compatible with a minimal degree of ego weakness.12 Consistent with the limitations of her approach Reichard even refuses, against Reich,13 Fairburn and Marmor,14 to consider that oral fixations could be part of this pathology. Most of the Ego-psychologists approve of her effort to put hysteria in its place. Thus when, twenty two years later in New York (1978), Krohn writes the monograph which codifies the renewed hysteria, he emphasises that what determines it is founded in the end on the functioning of the ego. He considers that the debates concerning the degree of libidinal maturation detectable in this neurosis, which lead one to discern a genitalisation of the mouth (Reich) while another cites oral use of the genitals (Marmour), evoke the scholastic debates on the sex of angels. We can hardly disagree with him.

In any case no one inquired into Freud’s reasons for considering that hysterics existed who were ‘not very prone to conversion’ producing problems more psychic than somatic. Reichard rejects them as a sleight of hand, considering that notions of ‘hysterical psychosis’ and ‘dementia’ belong only to old psychiatric terminology. To this she prefers the Bleulerian renovation promoting a tentacular schizophrenia. She accepts that the diagnosis of schizophrenia remains obscure but does not doubt that it comes first from a deficiency of the ego. Like Bleuler, she considers that this pathology is very common and is not necessarily of a psychotic nature.15 In fact, into this confused mass of schizophrenias, in which the majority of patients will be found, her colleagues are already introducing new discriminations beneath which the great neurosis will succumb even more.

The constriction of hysteria is supposed to isolate a pathology which constitutes a good indication of analytic treatment and of which the prognosis is judged to be favourable. Fenichel, Fairburn, Glover, Reichard all agree on this point. This is less the case by the beginning of the 60s. At this time Ego-psychology conceives the notion of ‘analysability’. Shortly afterwards its negative, ‘unanalysability’, will be heard like a gangrene all the way to the reduced field of hysteria. It is in New York, precisely where Kris’ study group is elaborating Ego-psychology that, according to Easser and Lesser, from 1965, the repeated inability of analytic treatment to reverse the course of hysterical symptoms, leads therapists to uncertainty, discouragement and disinterest, even causing some to turn away from this field of unproductive research.16 From this time only a restricted number of subjects sufficiently mature and adapted are to be included in the category of ‘hysterical personality’. They will have to be differentiated from a large group of ‘hysteroid’ patients who react in a negative manner to the efforts of the analytic treatment. Three years later, still in New York, E. Zetzel divides what is left of hysteria into four groups within which the ‘analysability’ of subjects will decrease. ‘The good, true hysteric’, as he calls her, can only be found in the first category, difficulties arising in the others.17 The incomprehension which has been installed between the hysterics and the Anglo-Saxon analysts is carried to its ultimate point in 1974 in an article by M. Khan: it is towards a theorisation of a fundamental unanalysability of the great neurosis that this author directs himself. “The internal world of the hysteric”, he claims, “is a cemetery of refusals.” Her memories are incarnated in somatic states of a kind that they lend themselves “neither to psychic elaboration nor to verbalisation”.18 If we follow this argument through it is nothing less than Freudian conversion that should be thrown into the dustbins of psychopathology. In short the very inventors of psychoanalysis seem, three quarters of a century later, to be fundamentally rancorous and protesting. Do they not in fact have good reason? Psychoanalytic treatment has become full of traps: those who escape the tentacles of Kleinian interpretations risk being called upon to bring about a good therapeutic alliance or to proceed in order starting with the resistances. Hysterics are too aware of the impossibility of the sexual relation to accommodate themselves to these kinds of knowledge that are being force-fed to them.

The unanalysability of those rare subjects who still enter the reduced field of hysterical neurosis is a thesis which hardly appears in texts prior to the 60s. The novelty is judged contemporary with the advances in the psychology of the ego concerning the notions of working alliance and analysability. These new concepts require as a condition of a psychoanalysis the presence in the subject of a sphere of autonomous ego free of conflicts. It is on the basis of this healthy mode of apprehension of reality that a transference can be analysed which is understood as inherent to the lived pathology. In fact, even hysterics with a strong ego assumed able to profit from an analysis, even these, according to Krohn (1978) balk now at the treatment-type. “The hysterical personality”, he claims, “tends to evaluate hypothetical-deductive words and reasoning, even if the person is intelligent and capable of such reasoning. When she functions in this way verbal interpretation loses its therapeutic effectiveness. The hysterical personality hears words as caresses, gifts or chastisements. She often uses them to try to combat the mistaken explanations of her behaviour.” One gathers from these lines that the ideal analysand according to Krohn and Ego psychology is a rational being capable of distancing herself from all manifestations of her unconscious. On grounds such as these analytic treatment would not even be adapted to those who wanted to become analysts, even to the least neurotic among them. Nothing in common with this irrational, infantile, contrary being who would be, according to him, the hysteric. “This kind”, he continues, “judges the interpretation as being proper to the therapist only as long as he remains a passive receptor. This disinvestment of words is the integrating part of the cognitive style of the hysterical personality. The inattention to words becomes a mode of banal defence for the hysterical personality who often simply does not hear the therapist. Her wish is to observe him speaking, to listen to the tone or quality of his voice, while considering the words as a boring and unimportant part of the therapy. In relation to some patients such an attitude to words and thoughts can be usefully interpreted as characteristic resistance. With others this attitude cannot give way to interpretation, so that the results of the treatment can be limited. With this last type of patient, interpretations remain unheard for a long time, earlier insights are forgotten, such that the masculine and scientific therapist who understands ‘such complex things’ is responsible, for the author, for all the insights except the most superficial”.19 At this point we are not surprised that such patients are often accused of manipulation, sometimes provoking the therapist into reacting with anger or anxiety. Krohn does not forget to note that the difficulties encountered in the treatment can lead to measures of retaliation on the part of the analyst. So the hysteria of which he speaks to us is a neurosis ‘which slips away’, according to the title of his book, a neurosis of which the field of extension shows itself to be considerably amputated in relation to Freudian hysteria.

Does this not remind us again that the first hysterics treated by Freud, those with whom he invented psychoanalysis, presented on the contrary serious forms of neurosis? “To date I have only been able”, he wrote in 1904, “to establish and try out my therapeutic procedure on very seriously ill patients, on more or less hopeless cases. I have only had access to patients who have tried more or less everything else without success, who have spent years in institutions (…). Psychoanalysis has been created on a study of patients incapable of adapting themselves to existence and to their inattention. It is a great triumph for it to see a great number of these unhappy people rediscover the possibility of living”.20 Everything leads us to believe that the New York progress in psychoanalysis led to a considerable restraining of the field of action in the analytic treatment at the same time that hysteria was reduced to shrinking away.

Well before Krohn’s work, a large part of hysteria had been shifted by his colleagues into other nosological categories. If a delirious idea or some suspicion of hallucination were discerned, the concept of schizophrenia was in general called up. In any case, between this and the remains of hysteria a field was formed, constituted by patients who fitted badly into the analytic process disinfected by the therapeutic alliance. To circumscribe it new concepts had to be developed, ‘pure psychosis’, ‘affective perversion’ or ‘narcissistic personality’, but it was above all the category of borderline that acquired wide usage.

Freud ignored it. It was introduced in its modern form in 1938 by Adolf Stern, an Anglo-Saxon analyst, but it was above all Victor Eisenstein who, from 1949, established the basis of its acceptance. One after another found their departure not within the scope of semiological research, armed with statistical work or with a review of established criteria, rather it was from the difficulties encountered in the therapeutic treatment with certain patients that the notion of borderlines arose in their writing. They considered that despite the apparently neurotic symptomatology presented by certain patients, they did not behave in the treatment like ordinary neurotics. Eisenstein observed for example that they tended to transform an interpretation into a ‘threat’.

The real fortune of the borderline concept seems to have been correlative with the introduction of unanalysability promoted in the 60s by New York Ego psychologists. All agreed, following the work of Knight (1953), in considering that the weakness of the ego in borderlines rendered them little able to form a ‘therapeutic alliance’ deemed necessary to the progress of the psychoanalytic treatment type, such that the therapeutic methods had to be modified with certain patients. In 1974 Green put forward the opinion that it would perhaps be better to consider them as ‘borderlines of analysability’, adding, “one knows that what characterises these clinical pictures is the lack of structuration and organisation — not only in relation to neuroses, but also in relation to psychoses” — thus joining Bergeret against Kernberg.21

What is it from then on that differentiates a borderline patient from an hysteric made acrimonious? Essentially a notion of excess proper to the former: the weakness of the ego more marked, libidinal regression more accentuated, richer symptomatology. On this basis of deficiency arise problems of identity, acting out, hallucinations, and passing delusions. That it was necessary to integrate great hysteria into this pathology Kernberg suggested clearly when he included the dissociative problems of the DSM. Moreover Krohn places Esser’s ‘hysteroids’ and Abse’s ‘hysteromorphes’ in the same category.

The work of the New York analyst Otto Kernberg constitutes today one of the major references concerning borderlines. His 1975 work on borderline personality problems aims at a complete, methodological study of this nosological entity. He considers that ‘borderline’ describes “an organisation of the personality which is neither typically neurotic, nor typically psychotic”. He tries to describe it by writing of the persistent problems in ego functioning. In the same year in France Bergeret published La dépression et les états-limites. The title is justified because he believes, in opposition to Kernberg, that depression constitutes the most characteristic symptom: it proves to be an evolutive risk constant in borderline pathology. Further, in an original way, he considers that this testifies to an astructuration. The subject would be too massively dependent on the variations of external reality to fit the solidity and fixity of one of the two structures that he recognised: the neurotic and the psychotic. Kernberg and Bergeret differ on several points in relation to the metapsychological apprehension of the borderline; nevertheless they agree in considering that in most cases modification of the analytic treatment type was necessary in order to deal with such patients. On what was to be modified there were deep divergences: Bergeret proposed “an organisation in two stages of the treatment type in what concerns the interpretative game of the analyst.” It entailed first dealing with the pre-genital problematic before analysing, at a second stage, the Oedipal material.22 In reply, Kernberg proposed ‘a psychoanalytically inspired interpretative psychotherapy” which takes place face to face, which aims to reinforce the ego, clarify reality and not allow the transference develop too much.23

The similarities between ‘rancorous’ hysterics and borderline patients appears to be interesting. Each one notes that the latter possess a large number of hysterical traits: their exhibitionism is described, their narcissism, their erratic behaviour, their intolerance of frustration combined with a propensity to angry behaviour, the common presence of conversion phenomena, and the increased frequency of this pathology in women. In the domain of sexual life the majority of the authors describe problems with object relations, resulting from the persistence of Oedipal conflicts, which lead to an unrealistic idealisation of the partner. It results in an instability in heterosexual relations bringing out the most banal means utilised by the hysteric to maintain her desire unsatisfied. On the other side the borderlines show themselves to be subjects who adapt badly to the analytic treatment and are changeable and sarcastic, we are told. They show themselves to be disagreeable with the therapist, trying to manipulate him. Bion claims that they dodge the comprehension, avoid insight, paralyse the dynamism of the analytic process; in apparent agreement, they conceal in fact a rejection of interpetaions.24 The similarities with what Krohn claims concerning the attitude of hysterics in analysis is clear to see. All of which leads us to believe that the same causes produce the same effects. The similar handling of the treatment, centred on reinforcement of the ego, provokes identical rejections on the part of patients no doubt less differentiated than their therapists suppose.

The case of Gilberte

An observation of a borderline syndrome, qualified as ‘very pure’ by Bergeret who reported it, allows us to put this hypothesis to the test. It concerns Gilberte, a very beautiful young woman of 29, who is suffering from depression for which she has already consulted several doctors. Without success. She has also recently interrupted an attempt at analytic treatment.

It would be difficult to find a more exemplary observation of the most common form of this neurosis met today in our culture. The need to maintain desire unsatisfied is manifest. “The frustrations of childhood”, wrote Bergeret, “had left in her an effective inexhaustible protest, an irreducible unsatisfaction, a permanent fishing for favours”.25 Seductive behaviour correlated to a shrinking away as soon as the other looks as if he is going to respond to this seduction is noticed by the analyst from the first meeting. We see that she is interrogating the master, going from doctor to doctor, lying in wait for faults in their knowledge, ready to expose it, as the first attempt at a psychoanalysis, quickly ended, suggests. In her love relations she is looking, as Lacan points out, for “a master over whom she can reign”, which she finds by taking a lover much older than herself, with the allure of authority but seriously wounded in the war. Bergeret commented pertinently: “She had looked for a relation with an ideal protector and this she found, while at the same time she could dominate him and keep him at a distance.” Even the childhood seduction scene was there. What would have been associated with it remained marked by a partial repression. We know that Freud had started to build his theory of hysteria on similar material, so characteristic is it of the hysterical fantasy.

Why then does Bergeret not consider this patient to be an hysteric? It seems that there are two essential reasons. The first is the absence of a specific symptomatology, in particular that of conversion, apparently lacking. In fact, according to him, “every neurotic picture is more often dominated economically by symptoms rather than by depression”.26 An affirmation which the banality of the association of somatic ailments and depressive feelings in the contemporary hysteric contradicts, even more than the fact that most of the American authors describe the presence of conversion phenomena in borderlines. Further, if Gilberte were hysterical she would have been able without too much difficulty to adapt to the treatment type; however Bergeret only describes three preliminary sessions without indicating whether or not they constituted the prelude to analytic work. Effectively, the experience shows that after a first unsuccessful effort due, according to Bergeret, to the inexperience of the analyst, too quick to disengage the Oedipal desires and to handle the penis and the maternal breasts, it thus proves to be difficult, not only to undertake a second treatment, but even more to make it good. Everything leads us to believe that if Gilberte did get involved again she would turn out to be a difficult patient, ready to argue with interpretations, even to refuse to lie on the couch, trying to get the analyst out of his chair but ready to push him back into it if he took the risk, in short she constituted, according to my understanding, the prototype of an hysteric become a borderline. A badly handled treatment seems to have left her disabled, undermining perhaps even the symptomatic constructions, leaving her prey to a depressive state, and no doubt making her into what was for some an ‘antianalysand’.

Which seems to indicate that the Gilberte case undoubtedly has a more general interest. It is the modifications brought to analytic treatment by certain post-Freudians that aroused an increase in the number of subjects resistant to analysis, a phenomenon which found a more acceptable justification in blaming the borderlines, rather than taking up a revision of the well-foundedness of the novelties introduced into Freudian treatment. In short, ever less analysis of fantasy, ever more emphasis on the ego. The analyst being thus led to appeal increasingly to rational comprehension of a subject summoned to form a therapeutic alliance, he slides towards a position of mastery. At first the hysteric might be seduced by this, but very quickly she cannot bear it any more, she panics and turns to the borderline.

It remains only to re-write history erasing the Freudian discovery: Anna O, exemplary observation of hysteria according to Breuer and Freud, proves to be a borderline; Kernberg includes the majority of dissociative problems in DSM-III in the same category; while others tend to assimilate the mechanism of conversion to the simulation of an illness in order to cleanse it of all reference to repression.

The misunderstanding of the un-triggered psychotic structure

Nevertheless the borderline concept does not only get its substance by annexation of a whole branch of hysteria. It has another major source: un-triggered psychotic structure is misunderstood by many clinicians for many reasons, the principle one being that many refuse a priori the very notion of psychotic structure, while those who do admit it have hardly studied it. Works on this question remain rare.

Let us remember briefly what presides over its identification. On one side, the presence of signs that testify to the fact that the elements of subjective structure are not knotted in a Borromean way. In the imaginary dimension the problems of identity (interweavings of identity, illusions of doubles, functioning as if, etc.). In the symbolic dimension the indications of rupture of the signifying chain (neological creations, irruption of the letter, deficiency of phallic signification…); in the dimension of the real, the non-extraction of the object a, which has numerous consequences (fleeting emergence of unlimited jouissance, opening up of push to the woman, deficiency of the fundamental fantasy, affective effusiveness, sign of the mirror etc.). On the other side the subject must be capable of putting in place a compensating mechanism, more or less elaborated, to screen the structural fault, by the construction of a work, by leaning on a partner or on imaginary identifications, by the adoption of a determining fantasy etc., eventually by having recourse to many of these methods.

The appearance of the ‘as-if personality’ of H. Deutsch is an example in this respect of misunderstanding of un-triggered psychotic structure. When she objectified this syndrome in 1934, she underlined, according to the title of her article, ‘their relation to schizophrenia’.27 She claims that her schizophrenic patients gave her the impression that the schizophrenic process passes through an ‘as-if’ phase prior to the construction of ‘the hallucinatory form’. Also it is perfectly justified to consider that what H. Deutsch presents consists in making evident one of the clinics met in the antecedents of a triggered psychosis. Lacan also considered this discovery when he drew attention to it in 1956. He met the ‘as-if’ as a ‘mechanism of imaginary compensations’ to which subjects have recourse who “never enter into the play of signifiers, except by a sort of exterior imitation”.28

Emigrating to the United States in 1934, welcomed by the Psychoanalytic Society of Boston, in an intellectual milieu in which the analytic discourse was increasingly putting the functioning of the ego to the fore, H. Deutsch had no difficulty in considering that the borderline concept provided a inviting category for the as-if’ syndrome: did it not seem precisely to bring a contribution to the problems of the ego? According to this new perspective, it appeared to be coming from a certain degree of faultiness in the ego — which, in being accentuated, could give birth to a clinical psychosis — and not as resulting from a phenomenon of compensation. Nothing stood in the way of this contribution to the antecedents of schizophrenia could find themselves captured in the 60s by a concept which many considered to be a theoretical advancement: its wide and imprecise semiology allowed the inclusion of most subjects in whom the defences were not structured on a neurotic or psychotic model identifiable by the classics. It is precisely during these years that the discoveries of chemical therapy would multiply such clinical pictures. The progressive reduction of delirious and hallucinatory phenomena, the fragmentation of the evolution of psychotics permitted the much more frequent observation of a wide variety of symptomatic slidings; nevertheless, despite the neurotic appearance of certain evolutionary modes, the subjective structure knew no mutation, at worst it was disorganised, at best the processes of stabilisation were elaborated. In addition, the foreclosure of the Name of the Father was not interpreted, so that H. Deutsche’s patients who had psychotic structures presented the same characteristics as those of Eisenstein who were placed on the edge of neurosis. They too showed great difficulties in settling into the treatment type. The borderline concept veils the fact that the identity of the phenomena of rejection of the interpretations rests on reasons which are extremely different. Thus it constitutes an epistemological obstacle in relation to any study of the differences in conducting the treatment.

***

There certainly is not room to deny that the ‘border’ symptomatology constitutes an objective syndrome. On the other hand it is very doubtful that it constitutes a trustworthy clinical type. The borderlines category has two major sources in the psychoanalytic field. On one side, it is a creation of a treatment-type, a notion rejected as much by Freud as by Lacan, who insisted that psychoanalysis be rediscovered with each analysand; in fact if an hysteric balks too much against the therapeutic alliance her pathology risks being considered as coming from the borderline field. On the other side of this syndrome, in particular when it comes to H. Deutsch’s ‘as-if’ personalities, one meets subjects with psychotic structures, not discerned as such, for lack of a sufficiently precise grasping of it. In brief, Rich commented correctly in 1978 that the borderline syndrome constituted a junk room in which undiagnosed patients could be assembled.29 We would add that this happens when one economises on a rigorous approach to the structure of neurosis and that of psychosis.

No doubt the borderline concept, born out of the psychoanalytic discourse, owes its success to circumstances favourable to its expansion met in the field of psychiatry ever since its emergence. Its spread, since the 50s is contemporary with that of psychotropic medicines. In somewhat reducing the subject’s anxiety they take the edge off the defensive work and the elaboration of symptomatic constructions. They support the appearance of a new clinic in which unconscious formations are smoothed over rather than foregrounded, diffused anxiety and depression becoming dominant. The pictures, formerly classical, are suffused by chemical therapy in a jumbled syndrome of which the definition is darkly negative, neither neurosis nor psychosis — such as they were known.

Those clinicians may come again who draw the same conclusions from these claims as those of Bally-Salin, who, accompanying the introduction of neuroleptics, observed that they had “the essential effect of pacifying the ill, which was the achievement of the disappearance of positive symptoms”. “We were unable”, he continued, “to bring the patients something which would be sufficient to allow them to structure a new mode of existence and a new psychic economy. Thus we had to force ourselves to find something of the sort. That brought me to analysis”.

- Jean-Claude Maleval