Reply to "The End of History."

You've tapped into a few important veins here. First, the conflicts of the twentieth century arose out of totalizing ideologies that can be understood in a broad sense as setting up, for the globe, a unified world history that proceeds through dialectic. This unification of previously disparate, or at least multiple, histories through dialectic was something constructed in discourse, and then returned upon the world as tremendous machines crossing the lines of economics, politics, and ideology and organized according to one of a few of a finite number of vantages or interpretations of this new logic of history.

The central idea was, indeed, that history was ending and the victor would determine future existence for the entire globe, against an opposing force aligned perfectly opposite to it in terms of values. I would maintain that this was not in any sense prescribed by philosophers in the 19th century but at best palpitated by them, or extrapolated from trends. Far from directing the trends as kings, the philosophers were perhaps directed by the trends to fulfill a budding requirement of a history yet to be, but making itself--while in the process remaking all historical self-understanding to be an understanding of this particular history's rise.

Marxism first sets up the history of the world as the history of mechanical production, organized along certain dialectical oppositions whose latest, ending stage is industrial class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat. And, in a sense, National Socialism reacts against two features in particular in this account: the notion of history as that of means of production, and the leveling of all differences to amount to just class; however, it is precisely this reaction against the totalizing character of Marxism and the leveling feature of capitalism that Marxism that for granted that makes national socialism also a totalizing ideology. Meanwhile, liberal democracy reacts against both along the axis of collectivism and individualism.

Now, there are two ways we can understand the outcome of this human construction of a dialectical history; either it fizzled--there was no final synthesis, and the victor was just drawn from either side of the conflict without proceeding through the stage of the negation of the negation of the other. IE: capitalism just wins in a dualistic conflict with collectivism and doesn't take its nature into itself. Meanwhile, we could read national socialism perhaps as a failed attempt at synthesis,in that it combined the perpetual mass mobilization of socialism and a corporatist dividing up of industry with a money and profit structure. This would surely be controversial, with certain left wingers today--even Zizek--preferring to call Nazism a "pseudo-event" that doesn't fit into their dialectical picture at all, rather than representing a failure of that picture itself. On this view it is not Nazism that is the pseudo event but dialectic historical narrative that is.

We can also describe this fizzling of dialectic in terms of thermonuclear war: the great global conflagration between the capitalist and communist states, which i have described many times and am confident in as the inevitable historical narrative in a non-nuclear twentieth century, was thwarted by the possibility of total annihilation. This conflagration would have transformed the victor into that "negation of the negation" of its other--whether capitalism in the case of communism or vice versa--because of the intensity of a mass mobilization that, perhaps, only a hybrid of the two systems could have absolutely perfected.

But its possible for another reason: that the dialectical process did complete itself in the triumph of this post-cold war order, and that dialectic now faces its opposite: the resumption of multiple histories that arose or were transformed out of the triumph of of the totalizing historical narrative--but splinter off from it and feed back against it in a new and fundamentally non-dialectical conflict (with the terrorists being a false dialecticization of a multiple enemy.) this is the reading i prefer--but the question arises, when is the historical site of completed dialecticization? is it the fall of the Berlin wall, or does it develop before?

Have we not, rather, pinpointed the site through an engagement with Curtis's works? Ernest Dichter, the founder of modern advertising, considered himself more than just a money maker but a patriot in that he found ways of effectively continuing the mass-mobilization of American society after the war. Without consumerism, he said, millions of men previously employed as soldiers would return home--and with no demand for war goods, factories would close, unemployment would skyrocket and socialism might succeed. Yet the only way to gainfully employ so many people in an industrial economy would be to drastically ramp up production--and to do this meant ramping up demand, which meant ramping up desire. At the same time, the techniques of game theory were busy creating an internalized, mathematical representation of our enemy--only to become the basis of economic organization for the world.

Thermonuclear war sublimated the vast, apocalyptic confrontation and the true world war; the same mass mobilization that started in World War Two and would have continued and become totalized in an age of global violence was thwarted. And dare I go out on a limb and say that the communist powers would have won? I will say it; the soviet military machine in 1945 endured vastly more hardship, fighting, victories and defeats than the United states military. Despite many millions dead, the Soviets still fielded four times the divisions as the United States and Britain along with similar numbers of air craft and tanks--and their models were greatly superior to ours. The Soviets had basically defeated the Germans before we entered the war against on a combat front on d-day (the Italian campaign involved but a small fraction of German strength,) and even after the landing the bulk of German forces were concentrated on the eastern front.

I believe that the communist system was capable of a mass mobilization, and a mass sacrifice of all human values, for victory in a way that our system simply wasn't. Americans lost a few hundred thousand men and gave up much of our cherished discretionary goods; we donated tin cans and went without new car tires. but in Russia every fiber of the being of the people was either directed to the front or in arms production. it is true that this sacrifice, along with successive waves of mass tragedy for decades before, eventually eat away all the positive social ties of the Russians and their empire crumbled away as much by a deep malaise and depression as anything else; however, as long as the war machine kept turning they would have continued against us, mobilizing new nations as they went under the self-fulfilling prophecy of the people's revolution.

And who knows? Maybe this phase and the aftermath would have looked something like the provisional dictatorship of the proletariat that leads to a communist utopia. We''ll never know any of these things for sure.; however, we do know that the advent of nuclear weapons thwarted history from a very different course that had been building for centuries; and it was put on a new course that invented, from marxism, a new and hidden dialectic not between the bourgeoise and proletariat, but between capitalism and communism as systems themselves. The synsthesis would com, as it always does, as the negation of the negation; that is, the negation of communism as the negation of capitalism, which produced a capitalism of mass mobilization responding to the mobilization of an insatiable desire.

There is a sense in which we did learn game theory from the Soviets. In them there was an irrational and all encompassing will to survive/win that would stop at nothing, and which utterly dispensed with all humanity in pursuit of victory. specifically in Stalin. We learn from World War Two, as the culmination of many wars, that rationality could break the most indissoluble bonds between human beings, and transform them into killers.

Now, anyway, what we see here is the reality of the end of history resolving the last contradiction. For what is the end of history except, not utopia which is just a projection, but--thermonuclear war? The accomplishment of it in fact creates a virtuality in our historic understanding that affects the last dialectical move. But the earth moves underneath, and it is the earth that furnishes the uranium. The earth has furnished the means for the immediate, terrible realization of the repressed wish of the civilized: to make it all end (which just is ressentiment.)

We ought to ask: why has the earth furnished us with this power? With its own native power? and why did being send us the understanding, yield itself as intelligible in such a way that the construction of bombs is even possible? With Heidegger we say "language speaks." "Language speaks us" but why did language speak out the plans for a hydrogen bomb? These are insolent questions; god withdrew from the world to leave it to its own devices. prayers no longer reached him, and people were not gathered. And in this rebellion there was just death, the drive to which was furnished by our will against the world; the means in which was furnished by the world, to give this curious monkey enough rope to hang himself with.

What are we being told by the existence of this choice? Zizek wrote somewhere that if we truly have the power, through the technological, to close off the horizon of being's sending--then it was illusory all along, being subject as it is to human caprice. But what if we are precisely given this choice, as is set up carefully by the affairs of history. Yet--this means that the choice is not an illusion but a real choice. We will either annihilate ourselves with our machines, or we will dwell on the new earth. And the hand of God has guided all history to this point with the utmost poiesis. In this we can be assured a good victory.