Communist Mysticism

[Zanthorus]

"...past prefigurations of communist societies (classist ones that is!) are ideologically inverted expressions of the need for communism. The allusion to the 'mystical body' (leaving aside the spiritist interpretations of the dominant classes) indicates the requirement, remaining ever unsatisfied, of the species to provide for itself together according to the communist formula "to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities".

Only communism manages to perceive in the dialectical process of class struggle the necessary lever for the attainment of the regime of social species; a regime in which individual and society form a coherent unity without all the contradictions of bourgeois society and indeed of all class societies. In class societies, the most we can expect is a symbolic communal meal, but not a genuine physiological reality of the mystical body, meaning literally a body which sees without eyes like the Greek Mistes, the soothsayer who sees better than ordinary sighted mortals.

It follows from this that the one society capable of mysticism is communism.

But far from the jaded interpretation dreamed up by the schools of bourgeois analytical thought, this doesn't signify confusion or undifferentiation, but rather Gemeinwesen, namely order existing in fact (i.e. not abstract order). That is to say, the reality of the species, realised and still expanding, in which life is really capable of producing and reproducing itself according to a plan, not as and end in itself but as an actual way of living. The species is mystical because it is able to see itself without finding a contradiction between the hic et nunc, though more often than not this is taken as meaning the survival of class society and its future as the 'natural' development of its premises, rather than the sun which is yet to rise.

We have always claimed that the one reality which can live this projected kind of life (and tries it out) during the domination of class society, is the party.

Therefore it is in this sense that the party has its own "mysticism" understood in the sense of the ability to see with closed eyes; its ability to see more than the individual eye of single militants, to live out this way of life in its internal relations.

The party has the advantage of a general and total vision, the party is communism unfolding before our eyes."

[Q]

wat

[Red Commissar]

http://cdn3.knowyourmeme.com/i/000/110/268/original/tumblr_lisp6ohmdy1qb3l9fo1_500.jpg?1301600689

[Agent Ducky]

This seems awfully seroius business. It's in Chit-chat. Why?

[Zanthorus]

Basically Rowan Duffy claimed that my interpretation of value theory was equivalent to religious mysticism and then in a recent thread about Bordiga brought it back up and said some stuff about Bordiga. It triggered my memory of this little gem, which is by one of the Bordigist ICP's whose Italian journal is Il Partito Comunista (You can find it in their English language journal 'Communist Left', issue no. 5 which is available online here (http://www.international-communist-party.org/CommLeft/CL05.htm)). The ICC once used it as an example of the scleroticism of Bordigism (Super srs ICC text on Marxism and Mysticism can be found here (http://en.internationalism.org/node/3830)). I thought it might prove interesting to get Revlefters reactions but apparently made a miscalculation somewhere...

[Obs]

I'm not sure you made a miscalculation, except that this is obviously the wrong forum to post it in.

[Zanthorus]

My posting of it was intended to be more funny than serious though.

[Agent Ducky]

Oh. I see. What you've miscalculated is Chit-Chatters willingness to read.

[Broletariat]

My posting of it was intended to be more funny than serious though.

To be fair, I did kind of laugh, but not for the reasons you intended :P

Also, go critique my notes since zero isn't.

[ZeroNowhere]

That's not even the best part:

"As far as psychoanalysis is concerned, fetishism is a neurotic pathology which derives from the child's exasperation at being attached to its mother's skirts. In that case then, in what does the fetish character of the commodity consist? To whose skirts has the bourgeoisie been over-attached since childhood? Yes, its plain! those of Mother Nature, not seen in her dialectical expression though, but in her metaphysical and abstract expression."

(Funnily enough, I think that there may be some worth to that last sentence. To your anti-Ricardian mysticism I raise my dialectical mysticism.)

Still, though, I like Socrates, so I have no right to complain. In any case, I do like this phrasing: "life is really capable of producing and reproducing itself according to a plan, not as and end in itself but as an actual way of living." There's a couple of decent points in there, although the brief nature of the article does mean that a few can't really be explained and that a bunch of different mysticisms are just thrown together a bit, which ends up sounding a bit humorous. It wouldn't surprise me if themes such as the unity of subject and object, society and individual and so on had come up in some form in mysticism, inasmuch as they have come up in art and such over the years, though. Incidentally:

"We see how subjectivity and objectivity, spirituality and materiality, activity and suffering, lose their antithetical character, and – thus their existence as such antitheses only within the framework of society; we see how the resolution of the theoretical antitheses is only possible in a practical way, by virtue of the practical energy of man. Their resolution is therefore by no means merely a problem of understanding, but a real problem of life, which philosophy could not solve precisely because it conceived this problem as merely a theoretical one."

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

I kind of like it.

[Os Cangaceiros]

This thread kind of reminds me of an instance in my 6th grade science class. My science teacher (a bespeckled archtypical science nerd) made some sort of joke about regarding the latin names of a species, and thought it was the funniest thing ever. We didn't get it. He explained it to us and we still didn't think it was funny.

[ZeroNowhere]

This thread kind of reminds me of an instance in my 6th grade science class. My science teacher (a bespeckled archtypical science nerd) made some sort of joke about regarding the latin names of a species, and thought it was the funniest thing ever. We didn't get it. He explained it to us and we still didn't think it was funny.It's just that we're all quasi-Bordigists supporting authoritarian, dictatorial socialism-from-above, and as such our humour will tend to be above everybody else just like the Party will be.

[Zanthorus]

It wouldn't surprise me if themes such as the unity of subject and object, society and individual and so on had come up in some form in mysticism, inasmuch as they have come up in art and such over the years, though.

I actually e-mailed Loren Goldner on a similar subject a while back and he gave me some useful reading material which he probably wouldn't mind me reposting (Partly because of his blatant self-promotion at the end):


Re-reading the Renaissance essay, I'm hard pressed to come up with any single work or handful of works that would help you. I see from the references that it drew on reading over at least a couple of decades. I read it long ago, but I recall Lukacs' The Young Hegel as inspiring.
I also remember liking M.H. Abrams's Natural Supernaturalism; tradition and revolution in romantic thought [c1971], although I don't recall if he gets to Marx. It's important because he does see the link between Boehme and the Romantics, and hence (at least implicitly) Hegel and Marx. From a reactionary perspective, the philosopher Eric Voegelin saw Marx very much as the heir of the neo-Platonic tradition, leading up to Hegel, in order to condemn them all as "Gnostics". But it one subtracts that overall judgement, I recall Voegelin making some connections that many overly-Enlightened Marxists miss. The first part of vol. I of Leszek Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism (an otherwise thoroughly mediocre book) traces out this same tradition from late antiquity (Plotinus) through Boehme and Hegel. As you probably know, E.P. Thompson in his last years was trying to uncover links between the 17th century radical tradition and the romantic poets.

If you get ahold of my book on Melville (now pretty steeply discounted on Amazon I believe) and check out the footnotes you'll probably find more leads.

[ZeroNowhere]

Speaking of romantic poets, one could probably detect a 'mystical' influence on some of Shelley's work (certainly in the imagery), and we do know that Engels, and perhaps Marx, were quite fond of him.

Thanks for sharing that, I'll take a look into some of the mentioned books and authors.

[Robocommie]

Oh. I see. What you've miscalculated is Chit-Chatters willingness to read.

I lol'd. :)

[Tablo]

It's just that we're all quasi-Bordigists supporting authoritarian, dictatorial socialism-from-above, and as such our humour will tend to be above everybody else just like the Party will be.
Oh, I see.

[Thirsty Crow]

I like communist mysticism in the form of poetry.

Here's a loose translation of a modernist work from the 1920s (Croatia):

Raise my eyes: searching for a human face
My proud figure contorts
Bend my head and think
Revo
Revo
Revo
Your wonderful eyes, Lutia
Of beginning nor end I know not
When will the borders of the horizon crack
At least with one eye we will peek into barricades' hell

The trick here is that "revo" in Croatian can be taken as an onomatopoeic word signifying the donkey's cry. I put "Lutia" since in the original there is "Lucija", a female name.
What'd you think?