/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13888092]

Wha do you guys think made Ernst Jünger so extremely anti-bourgeoisie

[Anonymous No.13888654]

Because hes such a romantic adventurer or tries to be

[Anonymous No.13888689]

>>13888092
The guy had had shrapnel flown through his head just missing his brain and ran through crossfire, jumped into the enemy 's trenches with nothing but his bajonet and much more all before the age of 23. Total chad and bro

[Anonymous No.13888872]

>>13888092
He was born that way. also because he, likely, interacted with lot of bourgeois class people and saw what scum they are first hand.

[Anonymous No.13888909]

After the Third Estate declared the Many to be everyone, there are no longer the Few that strive for greatness and glory, only society and the state. It is easy for us moderns to romanticize the pre-modern past to try to find meaning in the vulgarity of the bourgeois epoch.

[Anonymous No.13889108]

A more difficult question than it may appear. The Bourgeoisie are essentially a false nobility, a leveling agent - or part of the excess material in the refining process.
Contrasted with a Marxist understanding, one might say that the bourgeois is itself a class leveled by the new state, rather than an oppressive force or element of extraction. While being a barrier to a metaphysical understanding of the spirit of the age they are also, strangely enough, an underclass.

Just as the worker is damaged by his participation in economic and political organisation the bourgeois taxes his own potential by participating in these same movements - even if on the other, apparently hierarchical, side. There is a strange time conflict here as well, the bourgeoisie represents the failure of the nobility's struggle for power within the monarchy, and rather than any reconciliation with this defeat they merely capitulate. As a counterpoint to the left and right political strata they can be seen as a barrier in time, a class which refuses to recognise its defeat within the rationalisation process. In this sense, they maintain the functions of the old political and cultural order as an explanation of values within the new, without understanding how the political and state functions have shifted - in turn this acts as a drain upon vitality for both forms.

In short, they are the representative class of total non-dominion. This is most evident in rural areas which maintain noble aspects of culture, particularly in music and language. The society of nations creates a continent opposed to the old state while the bourgeois resides beneath all of its numbered residences - a numberless representation, a void before natural law, preventing any sense of permanence. The entire territory is leveled while the bourgeois acts as a vaccinated class instinct before the new race of men; thus they deny the elemental laws of a new order of nature, act as criminals before a totality of political theology.

[Anonymous No.13889153]

>>13888092
He was responding to their behaviour. Like the way people become counter-Semitic...

[Anonymous No.13889166]

He was, in his own particular way, an anti-hierarchical writer, who was neither a traditionalist nor a kind of Futurist, techno-optimist. He disliked the Nazis and the Nazis, in turn, had to begrudgingly deal with him due to his universal fame.

>>13889153
>Counter-semitic
Neonazi terminology is getting desperate huh.

[Anonymous No.13889295]

>>13889108
very nice, where can i read more like this?

[Anonymous No.13889319]

>>13889108
>when a halfwit tries to be profound

[Anonymous No.13889344]

>>13888092
Because they the bourgeois NSDAP ruined Germany.

[Anonymous No.13889360]

>>13889319
>when you're upset someone said something you don't like but you're not intelligent to actually respond to his points

[Anonymous No.13889393]

>>13889166
I would not characterize Ernst Junger as anti-hierarchical in any sense. He also espoused traditionalist and futurist views. He is characterized in my assessment by his supreme disillusionment with the way the world went precisely because he was such an ardent traditionalist. He realized the untenability of the different views he had espoused, the different ideals he had held. His later works, Eumeswil and Aladdin's Problem, are esoteric in their symbolism, but the view he seemed to have arrived at was a belief in God that enabled him to believe even amid the universal decay perhaps life would renew himself. I am interested how you may characterize Junger as anti-hierarchical.

[Anonymous No.13889421]

>>13889295
You mean specific to Junger's works? Not sure apart from Junger's writings, and some similarities in Schmitt. I've been thinking of possibly going through The Worker again and sharing notes or possibly even short essays on different themes. It's quite a misunderstood book and I don't know that it got very much attention after the English release.
I hope to write something on Schmitt's imprisonment, the crisis of identity, and liberalism which would explore similar themes, how they relate to our current situation and the possibility of figures of the future.
If you have a more specific question I might be able to think of a writing, my understanding is based mostly on The Worker trilogy and surrounding writings.

[Anonymous No.13889431]

>>13889319
Feel free to prove me wrong. Would love to learn more about it or be shown how Junger missed the mark.
Although I'm guessing the number of people who understand this position are very few, it is quite an unorthodox perspective.

[Anonymous No.13889461]

>>13889393
I wouldn't say anti-hierarchical either, nor traditionalist or futurist.
Not sure what the other anon meant, but perhaps regarding a politics of force, an elemental organisation formed through the necessity to take power in a state that had been divided against power.
He did say 'non-hierarchical in his own way'.

[Anonymous No.13889504]

>>13889461
Junger sounds almost Deleuzian at times. WWI, like the pop art acid late sixties, is one of those periods that rather than belonging in the past seems like a window into the future.

I HAVE BEEN FIGHTING FOR TWO MONTHS and I can now gauge the intensity of life.

HUMAN MASSES teem and move, are destroyed and crop up again.

HORSES are worn out in three weeks, die by the roadside.

DOGS wander, are destroyed, and others come along.

WITH ALL THE destruction that works around us NOTHING IS CHANGED, EVEN SUPERFICIALLY. LIFE IS THE SAME STRENGTH . fHE MOVING AGENT THAT PERMITS THE SMALL INDIVIDUAL f0 ASSERT HIMSELF.

i THE BURSTING SHELLS, the volleys, wire entanglements, projectors, Rotors, the chaos of battle DO NOT ALTER IN THE LEAST the outlines 0 f the hill we are besieging. A company of PARTRIDGES scuttle along before our verv trench.

v IT WOULD BE FOLLY TO SEEK ARTISTIC EMOTIONS AMID fTHESE LITTLE WORKS OF OURS.

-THIS PALTRY MECHANISM, WHICH SERVES AS A PURGE TO 0VER-NUMEROUS HUMANITY. I THIS WAR IS A GREAT REMEDY.

e IN THE INDIVIDUAL IT KILLS ARROGANCE, SELF-ESTEEM, #RIDE.

^Just as this hill where the Germans are solidly entrenched, gives me a nasty ^feeling, solely because its gentle slopes are broken up by earth-works, which throw long shadows at sunset. Just so shall I get feeling, of whatsoever definition, from a statue ACCORDING TO ITS SLOPES, varied to infinity. – I have made an experiment. Two days ago I pinched from an enemy a mauser rifle. Its heavy unwieldy shape swamped me with a powerful IMAGE of brutality.

I was in doubt for a long time whether it pleased or displeased me.

I found that I did not like it.

I broke the butt off and with my knife I carved in it a design, through which ‘I tried to express a gentler order of feeling, which I preferred.

BUT I WILL EMPHASIZE that MY DESIGN got its effect (just as the gun had) FROM A VERY SIMPLE COMPOSITION OF LINES AND PLANES.

[Anonymous No.13889527]

>>13889108
You've read The worker well I see. Perhaps I should do so again.

[Anonymous No.13889624]

>>13889319
Creightonfag?

[Anonymous No.13889693]

>>13889108

>In short, they are the representative class of total non-dominion. This is most evident in rural areas which maintain noble aspects of culture, particularly in music and language.

This is true not only in culture, but in politics as well. So much has been written about the so called "managerial class" and "political class", in truth they rule over nothing. The whole bureaucratic system of lower level functionaries, secretaries and lawyers run the system by themselves. They are completely impotent and justify their existence nowadays (even more so than the past) on purely symbolic level. But at the same time this illusion is vital because you can't have liberal parliamentary democracy without them. But things aren't as they used to be, there is almost a racial animosity by working class now in Europe against the decadent bourgeoisie, especially in France. They are a focus of hatred , yet what exact power or influence they wield over the working class lives isn't exactly clear.

[Anonymous No.13889780]

>>13889166
>anti-hierarchical
that is not true

>techno-optimist
he was this - to a degree

[Anonymous No.13889824]

>>13889108
From my research i got this : Jünger didn't like the liberalism that comes with the bourgeoisie culture. This culture created "societies obsessed with security and self-preservation". He cursed the nazis for appealing to the middel classes - and he said that for reaching out for support among common people the nazis embraced a plebeian spirit, Jünger was an elitist after all. Taking this and his hatred for democracy into consideration, i think we can see that he didn't care much for that the public wanted.

[Anonymous No.13889839]

>>13889824
and i suppose that the public at the time was bourgeoisie, or at least in spirit. Again he read nietzsche, so his hatred might come from him - to an degree at least

[Anonymous No.13889852]

>>13889824
>societies obsessed with security and self-preservation
Sounds like Nietzsche's last man. Jünger lived a adventurous life full of danger and excitement and in general had an aesthetic, aristocratic and altogether Nietzschean view of life, which explains his hatred for democracy and the bourgeoisie.

[Anonymous No.13889853]

>>13889824
>>13889839
disdain for the public, or at the least a kind of paternalistic authoritarianism, is just a staple of right wing thought from long before Nietzsche

This criticism of Fascism as being plebeian/democratic in spirit is pure Reaction.

[Anonymous No.13889864]

>>13889852
if i recall correctly Heidegger called Jünger the only true follower of Nietzsche

[Anonymous No.13889883]

>>13889853
>disdain for the public
Disdain for the public opinion might apply to him (i think). Im not 100% sure, i'm just thinking of what i read. I will have to read more.

[Anonymous No.13889925]

Being born into a bourgeoisie family - restless and young he found the bourgeoisie lifestyle boring. I suppose this feeling stayed with him.

He wrote this in his diary in 1907: "I too can say: If only it were war, I would be healthy. One day is like the other. No big pleasures, no great pain [...] I just read my diary again. Every day almost the same. Only occasionally a short joy, otherwise everything gray in gray."

[Anonymous No.13890490]

>>13889693
This is a good point, and what I was thinking about this morning, so it probably dominated part of my interpretation. In some sense this is the very core of generalised lunacy or clown world. The bourgeoisie won the conflict over worker states, but this is only a surface layer, a minor class of administration which, at most, is responsible for redistribution of material and appearances. There remains a subterranean force which is much more powerful and, to a great extent, determines the artificial constructions opposed to natural law.

Contrast this with the banality of bourgeois and common scientific explanations, one can imagine both the sense of world-weariness and violent opposition to the most minor aspects of daily life. This even intensifies the need for political opposition, but the bourgeois construction ensures that they will be unfruitful - no coincidence that this is compounded with sexual relations which are largely unfruitful. Abortion is the law of relations, asepsis the law of politics. This appears unnatural, as if only a vast conspiracy could create such a disconnect, but it is essentially the natural effects of an artificial way of seeing.

We now experience something different, as if we are on the other side and bourgeois rationalisation creates this medical atmosphere that has taken over the work space, architecture, and even the efficient organisation of the home. Yet, this could be the effects of a deeper form within the modern idea which has infected technological instruments.

[Anonymous No.13890502]

>>13890490
What people do not see, nor even look for, is the underlying depth, the essence. And instead the opposition, the critique, is itself just a part of the rationalisation process. They have enclosed themselves within a factory setting and are resigned to pulling the rotten potatoes off the line - motorized industry icreases the sense of movement for those who are most still.

This would be most clear in the continued belief in socialism and nationalism after their death around WWI, especially when retaining a sense of the old political formations. They failed, yet live on, and where they live on they have attempted to destroy, or shed, any premodern elements. This would explain the liberalisation of most of these movements, the origin of leftist hostility from within, and the inability of right-wing movements to find their own grounding - they rely solely upon modern systems, have a bourgeois enlightenment conception (so common in traditionalism), take a leftist theory approach as their foundation, or show hostility to the politically noble.

In either case they do not recognise that they are a bourgeois force completely in opposition to their own political foundation, all while being divided from its possibility further by the day. The common, and unifying, idea is that of acceleration, which is really the sense of a void before identity: the world moves on without us but this is because we have not recognised the fundamental shift in law, in the state which is now enacted through each of us. The paradox is that we are attempting to catch up with the past, and everything must be abandoned until this occurs, yet with each further move it becomes harder to reconcile with the metaphysical chasm.

The easiest way to explain it, I suppose, is that rather than occurring at the level of rationalism, or even something like hyperreality, it overwhelms us from the elemental and theological. Such a weight gives a sense of power lacking in all the materialist conceptions, those which lay traps preventing their own escape. Hopefully this make sense, it can be difficult to explain such things on a first go.

[Anonymous No.13890576]

>>13889824
That is an important argument as well, although I would have to go over those parts again to see if it is more significant than other elements or not. I wouldn't elaborate on it now because I have my own theory of the origins of this safety and security and wouldn't want to misrepresent him or sell short how close he may have been to my own theory.
>>13889527
I think it's an incredibly important work in its own right, but for me it was quite significant because I had come to similar ideas on my own. And rather than being disappointed that I was 80 years late I just have to take it as an opportunity, that the work is done and perhaps I can add some small amount to it or at least keep it alive.

[Anonymous No.13890653]

Collected Papers on Buddhist Studies

Šramanas: Their Conflict with Brahmanical Society

[Anonymous No.13890919]

>>13889108
The bourgeois revolution sought to organize politics to fashion a civilized society where social conflict would be mediated into civil conflict by society itself - but instead the mediating power that is supposed to express the will of society ends up standing above society in the form of the modern state. Legislation proves insufficient to resolve social conflict, and as bourgeois society enters deeper into contradiction through industrialization, the resolution of social conflict being subsumed by the state occurs not through a formal process of law but through the violent imposition of a power over the people. This appears to us moderns as a return to pre-modern barbarism in the face of modern civil government, an apparent return to the dominion of absolute rule of one over the many. Dictatorship is the logical conclusion of democracy as society becomes subsumed by the state.

The bourgeois revolution was supposed to end the dominion of the few over the many, replacing oppression with equality. The notion of the bourgeoisie as the oppressor in Marxism is a legacy of the unfinished bourgeois revolution, where exploitation is just another expression of a theory of rent, so that the industrial bourgeoisie become just another form of rentier aristocracy. The reason why this conception of class relations becomes the dominant one is because the Marxists historically in the 20th century politically continue where the old radical bourgeoisie of the late 18th century left off - as modernizing bringers of civilization - rather than, as Marx intended, an immanent critique of modernity that seeks to go beyond modern civilization from within the conditions modernity sets out for itself. Rather than a movement for revolution, Marxism ends up becoming a movement for reform, reconstituting the contradictions of bourgeois civilization in a different form, which is why the question of reformism a la revisionism contra the political idealism of the dictatorial cult of personality becomes such a heated opposition in the middle of the 20th century, because both sides express the process of the accommodation of the bourgeois state to society in contradiction, through the state subsuming and obscuring the underlying problem - which was the failure of the Revolt of the Third Estate to establish a self-governing society.

[Anonymous No.13890974]

>>13888872
T
H
I
S

[Anonymous No.13891510]

>>13889461
>>13889393
Late post but, in my limited readings of Junger, in light of his relationship with the Nazis, I always found him to be an ardent individualist. He's a traditionalist if you find an obsession with Greco-Roman culture to be traditionalist, which I don't particularly think is accurate. What I mean by traditionalism is a sociopolitical stance that upholds genetic/class ordained hierarchical structures in society, calling for some sort of forced return to previous modes of life (namely a feudal or pre-feudal society), whereas I find Junger to be nearly disinterested in those sorts of questions. I mean there's a reason he was obsessed with Nietzsche, and it seems to be because of his fascination with how the individual proves himself, carves out his own meaning (not in an Existentialist way, mind you) against life's struggle. I find that sort of viewpoint incredibly anti-hierarchical, as class/family hierarchy always presumes and enforces some sort of natural order in the world. Junger seems to have felt that it was too late for that sort of thing in modernity.

As far as technology is concerned, I think that Junger's approach might be crudely compared to accelerationism, insofar as he felt that technology, "Total Mobilization", the conversion of life into energy, had to be embraced, but not for the sake of the Futurist Techno-fascist Utopia. He clearly saw in mass industrialization the uprooting of former notions of meaning, purpose, etc., But unlike a typical traditionalist, he doesn't react to them as changes to be vehemently opposed, but as challenges to be adapted to, embed oneself within, so to reach some new and unavoidable terrain of human struggle.

I'm not trying to say he's a leftist, if that's what anyone thinks. Not at all. He's a strange conservative, Spartan like, doing his own weird thing that totally died with him, like Mishima or some shit.

[Anonymous No.13892690]

>>13891510

I don't think you can characterise Junger as an ardent individualist, there's that passage in Storm of Steel where he recounts the Spring Offensive when the German army broke the British lines and how he felt as if he was just a part of a wider being, and that was was at one with the rest of the charging men, which was more of a single entity than a group of individuals

[Anonymous No.13892710]

>>13889853
Opportunistic populism makes any disdain void of content in practice. The nazis were not only appealing to the masses but relying heavily on them, and relying on them as masses more than as a community of individuals. In that sense they are more populistic than traditional European monarchy who nonetheless recognize a bond between the sovereign and his people. The nazi regime is simply unthinkable without a media industry and a system of relentless national propaganda. It is "mass-shaped" or "mass-designed" if you will, it functions as a machinistic process of transforming masses of people into labor and military force. This is not exclusive to nazism but it is still an essential part of it.

All this makes it fundamentally incompatible with elitism no matter what the nazi leaders might have told themselves.

[Anonymous No.13892724]

>>13890502
>>13890490
>>13889693
>>13889108
All of this is very interesting athough also a bit confusing. What have you read that dwell upn those paths of thinking? Does Jünger himself discuss this? Have you read any Max Picard?

[Anonymous No.13892729]

does a translation of the original storm of steel exist?

[Anonymous No.13893222]

>>13891510
No doubt Junger was heavily influenced by Nietzsche, however, I also think he had major differences. It may even be said that he reconciles Nietzsche with Plato, what one would assume is an impossible task. Power remains one of the most significant factors, yet it functions like a magnetic pole between Form and Dominion. The Figure is essentially the monarch of this character within an era. Junger was a strong individual in the classic and noble sense, reconciling necessity with eternal laws and being.

As for accelerationism, definitely not. They are completely opposed perspectives, and the crude rationalism of these types is perhaps the ultimate bourgeois revolution, a revolution of theory alone, completely detached from reality and the necessity of the era. He describes acceleration as an end, the approach of a finality before a great shift. This is how I see it as well, economic worldviews are a generalisation of the non-type, of the leveled man concerned only with base self-preservation.

Technology is a means of transition, the snake shedding its skin, a passing through the hands between gods and man - then the theft and consumption of entire worlds by war. The challenge presented by such situations as technological destruction and war is not the object itself, but merely a first step. We are forced into this by the weakness of modernity, while the true object remains the dominion beyond the symbolic and mere appearance of power. Totality allows us to pass through the destructive phase, reorder that which survives as force - creating an entire territory of sovereignty.

He is pre-kantian and non-Christian, which presents some major dificulties for modern thinkers. Such a perspective is neither rationalised instrumentation to an idea, nor a powerful dictate of morality.

[Anonymous No.13893242]

>The human mind loves to believe in the power of conspiracy – and yet it is very difficult to decide whether these professional revolutionaries were in fact subjects or objects of the revolution. Are they like ravens that always lead lonely lives somewhere, then suddenly flock in from all directions when a carrion is in the fields? Do they resemble bacteria that appear in open wounds and disappear again when the healing power of blood awakens? Do they have a very different, hidden meaning than the one that their own consciousness suggests? Either way, they are there, and their existence is strange enough to be worthy of contemplation.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4437-ernst-junger-on-leon-trotsky-s-my-life?sfns=mo

Have you guys read this piece by Junger on Trotsky yet?

[Anonymous No.13893266]

>>13890919
Is this a marxist interpretation or your interpretation of Junger and the differences of bourgeois politics in this era?
I will just list a few differences before going any furhter: it is the state which is subsumed by society, at least temporarily; rather than being a barbaric formation the brutality is not destructive enough for the ideology of the time, thus the opposition to war in its ancien formations; power is universalised, hence the political divisiveness and spirit of man descending into madness; Marxism is a negation of the already present negation in the liberal era, and its attempt at completion of humanism through further material rationalisation leads to its contradiction, it simply cannot reconcile machinic processes with an ideal image of the human (thus it remains just another trasitional phase caught in stasis).

[Anonymous No.13893307]

>>13892724
The first of those is my attempt to explain Junger's opposition to the bourgeoisie while remaining true to his philosophy. The bits on time are my own elaboration but I think still within his thought. The main writings for these ideas would be The Worker and the other two essays in the trilogy.
The latter two posts are part of my own thinking and I am unaware of anything similar. It certainly needs to be clarified and tightened up. Junger has some writings on time in German, but as a learner I haven't gotten to them so can't say how similar they are. I'm sure they would be interesting though.
If you have anything specific that you were confused about I can attempt to clarify. I'll attach an old post that has some of my thoughts on Junger, fascism, and liberalism. I haven't reread it, but I think the focus from the point of myth and theology may be able to clarify a few things. Hopefully it doesn't just add to the confusion.

I had not heard of Max Picard, but from the little information I can find he seems potentially interesting. Why do you bring him up?

[Anonymous No.13893310]

>>13893307

[Anonymous No.13893533]

>>13888872
well its because of his bourgeois background that he turned up the way he did, he got a lot from his bourgeois family .. his parents were bourgeoisie - although one could say that he rebelled against some of his parents teachings

[Anonymous No.13894096]

>>13893266
It's a Marxist interpretation. My point was the connection between the bourgeoisie and the modern Bonapartist state necessarily conjures from within bourgeois civilization a "return" to barbarism. Really this return emerges from within bourgeois society coming into contradiction with itself. Its not actually a return to feudal monarchy, given that feudalism was the rule of the feuding barons and not of the absolute monarch, but is a result of the failure of civil society to express its will through the state, so that the power of the people is expressed not through the general will of society for itself but by a sovereign standing above that very popular will. Rather than a general public interest, the state expresses a specific private interest, which the public is subordinated towards

The resuscitation of the liberty of the ancients, of the realm of being and glory, in the face of becoming, emerges by necessity from the vulgarity of bourgeois civilization itself. It is not that the bourgeoisie are a "false" nobility, but their "nobility" is a necessary falsity - that being comes back - as a necessary condition for becoming. When Rousseau posited the pre-social individual in the state of nature, existing in a condition of ancient being, it is to unravel the freedom of the individual in and through modern society. There is no such thing as a natural man, its idea is a product of society. It's purpose is to pose how society, in the face of infinite degradation, enables the infinite perfectibility of man - being is posed to re-introduce becoming, in different form.

Yet this is insufficient. The problem with progressivism is that it necessarily resuscitates "old" forms of being to re-form society in contradiction. Progressivism is necessarily conservative, and inversely, conservatism allows for the possibility for progress. What Marxism seeks to achieve is not merely to supplant being with an endless process of becoming - the bourgeoisie have already done that for us - but to work through this endless process of becoming to overcome the very relation of being and becoming themselves. This nonetheless requires a return to being, but not just to supplant becoming with being, simply advancing progressive reform, but to work within this relation for its own self-overcoming.

When Kautsky argues against the Anarchists that the Marxist recognizes the necessity of the state, Lenin argues that while, yes, the Marxists concede the necessity of the state, but only to smash it and replace it with a semi-state destined to wither away. In this sense, the Anarchist readers of Marx, continuing on from the tradition of democracy as society for itself, end up for Lenin being closer to what Marx intended than the ostensible Marxists. Dictatorship is a necessary consequence of democracy, but the goal is to not just realize democracy - but through that overcome democracy into something entirely new.

[Anonymous No.13895083]

>>13890502
The problem with anti-bourgeois attitudes is that underneath they are ultimately bourgeois.

[Anonymous No.13895138]

>>13895083
That makes no sense.

[Anonymous No.13895395]

>>13895138
Yes it does. Anti-bourgeois attitudes are really expressions of bourgeois discontent against modernity. It's the self-hatred of bourgeois society against its own limitations, so as to fulfill its latent possibilities.

The demand for equality is itself the defining trait of the bourgeois epoch, therefore anti-bourgeois attitudes can take the form of furthering the bourgeois project of equality against the bourgeoisie, or even rejecting equality so as to reaffirm the continued dominion of the bourgeoisie as the ruling class. Even a struggle against equality is framed in bourgeois terms, as the oppression of society against the individual. The pre-bourgeois ruling class would never frame themselves in those terms.

[Anonymous No.13895438]

Also, it shouldn't be forgotten than industrialization fundamentally shifts bourgeois society away from the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie to the dictatorship of capital, so that rather than the bourgeoisie controlling capital, its capital controlling the bourgeoisie.

Mass proletarianization has ensured that even the bosses structure their everyday life in the same time-maximizing efficiency that the working class is forced to employ. Even CEO's place their relationship to the corporation as employees with a salary, albeit sizable and with special privileges. How we distinguish the few from the many collapses under the hegemony of the so-called middle-class: the great no longer exist. Rather than through our ties to production and the state, instead both is facilitated in and through consumption in the market. Mass culture has debased the creative potential of humanity.

[Anonymous No.13895885]

>>13895395
But in the case of a noble spirit being opposed to the bourgeoisie it is precisely an attack on their shortcomings. And the lack of consequences does not change the essence of the intent. One does not become bourgeois just because you say so, the individual is simply isolated.
And beyond the short term we already see an intensification of spirit in reaction to non-identity , particularly in the small states and anywhere trying to oppose the west's deadening of territory.

[Anonymous No.13896122]

>>13895885
Yes, and that emerges directly from the bourgeoisie. Even the term 'revolution', so essential for the bourgeois epoch, has Renaissance undertones, as simultaneously a progress forward AND a return to ancient glory. When the Third Estate declared the Many to be everyone, they did so under the banner of Sparta and Rome. What destroyed the sentimental nobility of the medieval period was made in the name of the glory of the ancients. So too were the 19th century progressive reformers influenced by medieval romantic sentiment in their facilitation of the subsumption of social institutions into the modern state. Freud, an example of the bourgeois reformers, disdained civilization's repression of primitive impulses, yet his sentiment towards these barbaric impulses is their expression into "civilized" ends (read: the power of the state).

Machiavelli, one of the very first of the bourgeois radicals, in the height of the Renaissance counterpoised ancient notions of democracy and oligarchy in the terms of the resistance against oppression and the dominion of the Great's pursuit of glory; for the purpose of ordering a republic in which the oppression of the many would be actively fought against, while the greatness of the few would be allowed their full expression. These apparently two opposed positions are in reality the foundations of the bourgeois revolution prior to capitalism placing itself into contradiction out in the open, the repression of this contradiction being why Machiavelli is the one thinker that influences all high bourgeois radicals but none explicitly refer to unless in apology or in condemnation, and the eventual reading of Machiavelli as a proto-fascist in the 20th century.

The isolation of the individual merchant within commercial society, created by the modern division of labor, alongside the financial institutions that allow for individuals to cohere together into a market economy; and the individual citizen within civil society, created by the ordering of the modern state, alongside the general will of society embodied by the political state; are the two poles of bourgeois subjecthood: private and public. The subsumption of society by the state, private versus public, is the basis of modern civilization, but it is through the state that society becomes independent from it, recreating "ancient" bonds in modern form. The individual is "removed" from the "ancient" community to ensure his own "re"-integration into modern society. The striving towards greatness is directed towards the ends of society - in opposition to greatness.

The problem is that we have forgotten the dialectic, and collapsed into post-WW2 democratic trimuphalism, so this process has becomes obscure to us.

[Anonymous No.13896421]

>>13894096
There is a lot in this, and I would like to give a full reply, but for now I just want to address one thing. Is the withering away of the state not just a mirror image of its opposition in the 'bourgeois state'? Not only is there a siege of a state that is not even there, it then seeks to regress the transitional stage of modernity with its own transitional stage. In other words, it is the negation of non-dominion.Hence why it was only able to take over nations with a centralised state and where the industrialised process had not occurred, thus giving it a transitionalperiod of heightened power for the workers.

[Anonymous No.13897077]

>>13888092
Daddy Issues probably
>His father was a chemist that made a fortune doing potash mining (Bourgeoisie stemlord)
>first book he ever read was about a kid traveling
>joins the Wondervogel aka proto-nazi youth
>during ww1 reads Nietzsche which is anti-Bourgeoisie

[Anonymous No.13897122]

>>13893307
>The Worker and the other two essays in the trilogy.
What trilogy?

[Anonymous No.13897138]

>>13897077
I don't see the correlation.

[Anonymous No.13897195]

>>13895438
I'll mention this first since the discussion has been quite good so far. There's a possibility of clashing at this point since we are getting to the level of fundamental differences in worldview, so I would just like to say that we should attempt to return this discussion to Junger's ideas as best we can. I'm not sure to what extent you are familiar with Junger, whether you are in the thread just for the discussion or if you are playing devil's advocate. Perhaps you could clarify your understanding of his writings and to what extent Marx surpasses them.

For my part I will say that Marxism, as well as any economic determinism, is false by its very nature. In simple terms, it can't see the non-economic for the economic, and there is an element of the simplicity of economic material being a powerful image of unification in a society opposed to elitism and hierarchy. There is no possibility of arguing against it, and it achieves something of a replacement function for totality in a state fundamentally opposed to nature.

There's a great irony in your perspective, where Marxism accepts the rationalisation process on its own terms, even elevates it into doctrine unlike liberalism, it can never escape this. It can never return to the human, this is perhaps captured best by Platonov in his short essay where the proletarian woman is deprived of the pursuit of love: the worker's soul is most deprived in the worker's state, and its world of siege ends almost immediately as it cannot see the beauty in its own being. The proletarian retreats into another territory, a second-order of work is created which can only end in the theological/cosmological labour of the soul, or a proletarianised bureaucracy. We of course know what happened.

One can imagine a similar process happening in the European states, although it occurs on another timeframe. The World War was our workers' revolution, or perhaps counter-revolution. I'll risk something of an opposite reading to Junger here and say that the Allied Nations had a peasant spirit rather than that of the industrial worker. This is clear in two ways: the Australians and Canadians were the best fighters apart from the Germans, and they were also responsible for the restructuring of military command in the same way that a farm must be able to self-manage. Elevating the soldiers power and sense of authority over themselves was exactly what allowed them to fight at the level of the Germans (leaving aside any discussion of pure skill or quantified mobilisation).

[Anonymous No.13897205]

>>13897195
If we consider Schmitt's idea of law founded within the New World - that the Nomos in this era is determined by the power of this settled territory - then this return of the colonies to save the parent nations of Europe is an equivalent force, or at least one of its elements. One might say this is incomplete until the occupation and destruction of Germany, but in either case there is a closing of the modern period, or at least its looming over the horizon (I would say this is not complete until the failure and collapse of America as ruler of the asymmetrical society of nations). We tend to not recognise this, but it is in every way as powerful as the Russian Revolution; perhaps much more so considering the consequences and the entire world crisis facing us now.
This victory of the peasant-like formation of the Atlantic Empire would also explain the shifting between proletarian and bourgeois identity. The simplicity of its being was felt by many of the late-modern philosophers and writers, and at a mythic level there is a cultivation of this new universal territory - the worker produces and assembles the machine for war, guards over its offspring to be raised into elemental value; the bourgeois manages machine organisation, labours elsewhere amidst its self-organisation, but refuses any law of rest before plenty; and the peasant sows the territory reaping the very creation of the technological. From this perspective there is a total inversion of Marx's class structure.
A few additional notes here. From a Marxist perspective one can look to Camatte's discussion of communism's democratisation, particularly in regard to the Frankfurt School. At the same time there is a proletarianisation in the West due to the subjugation of an entire continent to reconstruction/rearmament, and the centralisation of economic and productive forces to compete with a perhaps even more efficient state of total mobilisation. We cannot discount war here as the great leveler of economy and material, nor the metaphysical and spiritual changes its fear enacted. And even if the Soviet Union was not as efficient economically, which is debatable, it was the West's equal in war. More than anything else the 20th century can be seen as a tentative balance of retaining the law of war by other means. Technology was really the only mediator here preventing a total sacrifice of capital to a final war. The expansion of the bureaucracy and bourgeois science is largely just a Eucharist before this vast instrument.

[Anonymous No.13897213]

>>13897205
Further, we can say that the refusal of any figure of the original man or myth of creation forces both liberalism and communism to enact these forms in their place. The refusal of form even demands this constant recapitulation of image and a conflicted identity.

In relation to rearmament it is possible that man has realised his destructive power in the immaterial realm. Bourgeois politics allows for a means of destruction beyond that of warfare, and it is the only form fitting for the dominant figure of the liberal spirit. Or perhaps the bourgeois appearance is nothing more than the necessity of nihilism after the mysteries of destruction.

Capital is long dead. We have been witness to this event in two forms: through the collapse of its greatest centers, and the real subsumption of its production for war along with a further collapse of its territory into mere symbols. Where it remains as material accumulation it is a refusal to receive Eucharist.

The acceleration of debt is the nailing of theses through cryptography. Reformation and religious wars cannot explain what is signaled by this unfolding - there may be no outside but there remains a black sun within. Cosmological warfare of the individual will be the catalyst of the final battle of civilisation; immaterial its greatest weapon and perhaps the territory of victory. Class from this point onwards can only be seen as the conflict between territories.

From the perspective of myth time harvests space, and he who demands the complete sovereignty of his own time must bring all territory to devastation. The bourgeois works within this territory of time opposed to space, and thus cultivates a form of power unseen to material workers - a destructive power existent within material but which it cannot set to use of itself.

Our problem is the opposite of Platonov's proletarian girl. We have elevated her bourgeois spirit until she can no longer see the pursuit of love. The bourgeois soul is most deprived in the bourgeois state, and all it sees is its own beauty.

If the modern era is the total imprisonment of history then we must say that its technological law is completely opposed to a Promethean spirit. All of its creations are an attempt to reverse engineer Pandora's Box - hope is released into the world as the final paradox of humanism's war on myth.

https://youtu.be/q4cUskb0Flw

[Anonymous No.13897217]

>>13897122
The Worker, On Pain, Total Mobilization

[Anonymous No.13897220]

>>13896421
As mentioned prior, Marxism in the 20th century ends up fulfilling the functions of the old radical bourgeoisie as perfecting the state apparatus as modernizing bringers of civilization. Socialist dictatorships in third world countries were not semi-states overcoming modernity but modernizing states proper, providing the foundations for bourgeois modernity by (re)constituting the contradictions of (imperialist) capitalism through the perfection of the Bonapartist state. Their emphasis on the proletariat is because proletarianization, the simultaneous individuation (fracturing of old social bonds) and massification (into a singular unified social whole) of society towards the ends of capital, where everyone becomes merchant-citizens freely establishing contractual relationships to mediate a commercial-civil society (rendering such individuals into bourgeois subjects), is necessary for the development of capitalism.

The necessity of the state is conceded to accommodate towards (re)constituting bourgeois society under the conditions of imperialist capitalism, not to replace the state with society - which is really to say a semi-state that abolishes society. Supplanting the state with society would do away with society proper, and replace existing civil-political bonds with the free association of individuals, something that has never happened before in human history, and could only be made possible through the development of bourgeois commercial-civil society.

Marx saw in the revolts of the workers of 1848 and 1871 both the necessity of self-government (society for itself) and on the other hand the necessity for dictatorship, for political leadership to mediate between centralized power and the self-organization of society to subordinate bourgeois elements to the power of the working class. If it was merely just the need for self-government, which the Anarchists profess, then it would be regressive as it romanticizes bourgeois individualism, and does not recognize the development of the fulfillment of democracy through dictatorship, which is to say of the simultaneous subordination of the private sphere to a public general interest, and the subordination of the public sphere to a specific private interest: which in these terms is the subordination of the bourgeoisie to the proletariat. While Lenin refers to this dictatorship of the proletariat as a bourgeois state without a bourgeoisie, this can be misleading, insofar as the proletariat asserts itself as ruling class over the rest of society, thereby assuming the role of the bourgeoisie, but it is not, insofar as this bourgeois state attempts to supersede its own bourgeois character, allowing for the free development of each as a necessary prerequisite for the development of society as a whole, rather than the other way round.

[Anonymous No.13897227]

This is all speculation, however - something Marx would not have cared for. The problem with Stalinism, similar to liberalism, is that it celebrated the success of its own revolution as already fulfilling the possibilities for freedom, placing its further realization to some external compulsion, rather than comprehending its own entrance into contradiction, and thereby accommodating itself to the reconstitution of those very underlying contradictions into different forms rather than attempt to actually confront them. The counter-revolution is the further re-entrenchment of re-form-ism, the fulfillment of the failures of revolution, and with it a doubling down on the reconstitution of the contradiction. The fulfillment of democracy through dictatorship, on the side of dictatorship, rather than democracy, the furthering of the subsumption of society by the state to further modernization, rather than overcome modernity.

It should not be forgotten that the socialist movement itself begins as a form of bourgeois radicalism discontent with the legacy of the American and French Revolutions. What Marx proposed was not merely just another tendency of socialism, but the self-recognition of bourgeois society coming into contradiction, in a critique of the attempt to work through and beyond the bourgeois horizons of socialist radicalism. Communism, as the movement of the proletariat, offered to Marx the possibility of this self-overcoming. Marx himself, in the Communist Manifesto, after giving a genealogy in property relations, said "only in this sense" was Communism reducible to the principle of the abolition of private property. So, Marxism would have been an anti-bourgeois/bourgeois negation of the bourgeoisie's own anti-bourgeois self-negation - a negation of the negation, that sought to bring about the freedom of the individual through collectivism

[Anonymous No.13897252]

>>13897077
My understanding was that he had great respect for his father, who also had something of a noble spirit, at least in how he raised the kids. The bourgeois connection appears completely economic and one cannot forget the intense hierarchy and order that still reigned in this period of Germany.
As well, it's worth noting that 'workers' rights' first appeared in Germany, where the bourgeoisie maintained an element of aristocracy and treated workers in the same way that kings treated their subjects before the era of decadent authority.

[Anonymous No.13897514]

>>13897213
Aristotle argues in favor of myth against history, because to the ancients, history was merely a series of particulars, so it was in myth that one could grasp universal meaning. Becoming characterized history, while mythology embodied the unchanging great chain of being that characterized the caste civilization of the ancients. Modernity opens up the book of history, but to close its pages, as the culmination of the past unto the present, but without a future in sight. For the bourgeois epoch, to advance to the future was to simultaneously remember the past. In ancient times, a man would inherit his father's craft, and his son would inherit it in turn, for as long as memory would allow. In modernity, however, a father seeks for his son, as he enters into adulthood, to not repeat his mistakes and become better than he was. In doing so, the chain of being that bound tradition for millennia shatters, and can never be truly recovered.

The commodity form determines how man relates to his fellow man within society and how man relates to nature. This is not crude "economic" determinism, as if we are merely just utility-maximizing capitalists, but simply emerges from the statement of fact that our social relations, relationships between people in society, are mediated within a private sphere of citizen-merchants. Relations between people in commodity-capitalism are mediated through formal relations of exchange between things, so things obtain an objectively above and apart from the individuals involved, and are placed into a social economy that is more than the sum of its parts. The march of the economic engines of the invisible hand appears as both expressing human agency yet standing above it, as both a social force and a force of nature, planting unto these forces a mystified seemingly metaphysical supernatural character.

To affirm meaning through being, however, means giving in to the mystification the underlies modernity. It is not that God is dead because we live in a secular age, but that religion nonetheless still persists, in the form of bourgeois mysticism. To reject modernity in such a fashion is really to intensify the process of modernization, which exactly what the counter-revolution of the 20th century did. The solution is neither "civilization" nor "barbarism" - but socialism, the self-overcoming of both!

[Anonymous No.13897615]

>>13897514
This is interesting, thanks. There's a few posts here I'd like to reply to if it's still up tomorrow.

[Anonymous No.13898075]

>>13888654
>tries to be

[Anonymous No.13898274]

this is probably a decent thread but i admit i dont have the mental capacity to read it

[Anonymous No.13899417]

>>13898274
You can still give it a go.

[Anonymous No.13899534]

>>13888092
>The bourgeois sperm has some economic value inherent in it which cannot be baulked; thus we see the subconscious longing of proletariat women lusting after the bourgeois male. In a same fashion, the Greeks talked of the Minotaur which is a mythological creature which is half bull - the bourgeois symbol of aggressive financial optimism and prosperity - and half man. The aim of the priests of that cult seems principally to have been the production of a temporary incarnation of this beast - and by extension the financial prosperity that it symbolizes - by sending selected women of the community every year into the jungle/forest to mingle with all the imaginable bestial creatures thus to produce a miraculous birth of surplus value upon returning to community. - Karl Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer, 27 June 1851

[Anonymous No.13899558]

>>13889295
sounds like the classic Marxian description of the burgeoisie

[Anonymous No.13899857]

>>13897077
>Wealthy = Bourgeoisie

[Anonymous No.13899920]

>>13893307
Thanks for your anser, I'll come back to it when I have more time.

>I had not heard of Max Picard, but from the little information I can find he seems potentially interesting. Why do you bring him up?

He's a theologian whose central idea is that world and man is fleeing God, particularly in modern times. All of creation is propelled by a centifugal force that drives it away from the cneter and stability (God), hence why everything has been changing at an increasing speed the past four centuries.

Your comment about the baselessness and inconsistency of bourgeois power, about the fact that it's still trying to catch up to the past while already having been left behind by the present reminded me of Picard's concept. We flee from God, even though we might try our hardest to reach him, the intrinsic nature of our movement is centrifugal, and trying to get closer to God is only furthering the distance. The state of the bourgeois is an epitome of this according to your description: the bourgeois is reaching for the form of his old stability that was already a denial of God, but who is also the closest thing the bourgeois has to a God. And yet even that is already lost for us, we've adanced yet farther into our escape from the center. We're cursed to look at the unreachable past as the very bedrock of our world while it was never more than one step in the long road away from God. Hope that makes some sense.

[Anonymous No.13899965]

>>13889153
I thought anti semetic was enough of a euphemism

[Anonymous No.13901193]

>>13899920
That's a pretty good argument.

[Anonymous No.13902619]

bump

[Anonymous No.13902779]

>>13893222

I couldn’t agree more with your interpretation.

>He describes acceleration as an end, the approach of a finality before a great shift. This is how I see it as well, economic worldviews are a generalisation of the non-type, of the leveled man concerned only with base self-preservation.

>Technology is a means of transition, the snake shedding its skin, a passing through the hands between gods and man - then the theft and consumption of entire worlds by war. The challenge presented by such situations as technological destruction and war is not the object itself, but merely a first step. We are forced into this by the weakness of modernity, while the true object remains the dominion beyond the symbolic and mere appearance of power. Totality allows us to pass through the destructive phase, reorder that which survives as force - creating an entire territory of sovereignty.

Reminds me of the image of the pyramid.

>For a long time, technology appeared in the imagination as a pyramid standing on its head and undergoing unlimited growth, a pyramid whose free surface grew immeasurably larger. On the contrary, we must strive to see it as a pyramid whose free surface is progressively shrinking and which within the foreseeable future will have reached an end point.

[Anonymous No.13904090]

>>13902779
Yes, that is an incredibly simple way of describing it and runs counter to most understandings of technology. I don't know that an anti-tech position would really be able to deal with it.