The Worker - Tocqueville, Jünger, and Marx

[Anonymous No.18025251]

"It may seem as though sovereigns nowadays are interested in men only to make great things with them. I would rather they gave a little more thought to making great men. Better that they should attach less value to the work and more to the worker, and that they always bear it in mind that a nation cannot remain strong for long when each individual in it is weak, and that no one has yet found social forms or political stratagems that can turn soft and faint-hearted citizens into an energetic people."

[Anonymous No.18025273]

"Even class in the Marxist sense is supposed to dissolve as such after the dictatorial transitional phase. As current politics in the socialist countries confirm, this does not seem easy. It should also be considered whether our ways of life are not shaped much more by technology than by socialism. Society is trying to adapt to the means – first steam power, then electricity, and now nuclear technology. Primary however, in terms of the shape of the worker, are neither the technical nor the social structures; their changes are more like the consequences of an eruption."

[Anonymous No.18025509]

There was a thread here that didn't amount to much, but anyone reading The Worker should keep this in mind: Jünger was looking to reintroduce what Marx had distilled out of Hegel in the figure of the worker. Central to the worker is not his own being, nor even character - he is rather the ground from which the new species is formed. It is his position within the world plan which guides his efforts, and in this the old form of work is discarded.
One could even say that something like the labour theory of value has no meaning for him, he even dons it as his own form of power. Self-austerity is a means of will creation.

This is confirmed by Tocqueville's shrewd observation that work is not the intent of the worker, that he is with each effort moving away from the work process. The worker also moves towards the new sovereignty, and even if this deepens the nomos erosion it is not without its own form of power - no matter how destructive.
As a species formation the worker holds greater strength than any political order; the autochthonous is of the elements, before which natural laws can be little more than a transitional phase within a great metamorphosis. What can be said of positive laws in this? As Tocqueville correctly points out all modern law is an ordering of the species, outlining its boundaries within a providential dominion. Where this is lost there can only be a national weakening, an industrial aristocracy where the machinery is abandoned.

It is in this sense that Jünger welcomes the sovereign anarchy as a strengthening process, as nomos creation. Here we find the dominion of the worker.

[Anonymous No.18025596]

>>18025509
This is particularly true with WWI, grotesque subservience combined with immeasurable power.

[Anonymous No.18025705]

>>18025251
>>18025273
>>18025509
Are these texts excerpts from a book with the said title? Great thread anyhow, will contribute in a bit

[Anonymous No.18025865]

>>18025705
Democracy in America
Maxima - Minima
My summary

[Anonymous No.18026261]

Bump

[Anonymous No.18026546]

"As the principle of division of labor is more thoroughly applied, the worker becomes weaker, more limited, and more dependent. The art progresses, the artisan regresses. Furthermore, as the scale of manufacturing and capital investment increases, products improve and become cheaper, and as people begin to realize this, very wealthy and very enlightened men move in to exploit industries that had previously been left to ignorant or hard-pressed artisans. These men are attracted by the magnitude of the effort required and the immensity of the results to be obtained."

[Anonymous No.18026926]

>>18025251
tl;dr
>gibs me dat fo free

[Anonymous No.18027127]

>>18026926
Makes no sense.

[Anonymous No.18027747]

Bump

[Anonymous No.18028317]

"Some see in equality only the anarchic tendencies to which it gives rise. They are terrified of their free will; they are afraid of themselves.
Others, fewer in number but more enlightened, take a different view. Alongside the road that leads from equality to anarchy, they have at last discovered the path that seems to lead men ineluctably into servitude. They adapt their souls in advance to this inescapable servitude and in despair of remaining free already worship from the bottom of their hearts the master who is waiting in the wings."

[Anonymous No.18029294]

Bumpp

[Anonymous No.18029298]

>>18029294
>Bumping a dead thread no one wants to partake
Should have just let it die.

[Anonymous No.18029304]

>>18029298
Try reading sometime.

[Anonymous No.18029352]

[Anonymous No.18029386]

Didn't predict automation or even outsourcing. Into the trash it goes

[Anonymous No.18029402]

>>18029386
How do you predict something that was already occurring?

[Anonymous No.18029681]

Test

[Anonymous No.18030209]

>>18026926
You're an idiot

[Anonymous No.18030766]

[Anonymous No.18030859]

>>18025509
This reminds me of various things. The state of the worker, the human 'unit' upon which all else is measured. The base productive capacity that which all the higher social echelons lie.

Both Marx and Hegel, in their ways, adopted views that strike me as Enlightenment sparked: the innate value of man, each man, as capable and necessary to the greater to which they are constituents. Hegel, by ascribing an latent spiritual value to a man, his work, his, family; all needed to combine into one ultimate greater. And Marx, who, while acknowledging the differences in each man's productive capacities—according to him the measure of a man—still required each in his proper place to bring along his ultimate end. One utilised a spiritual worth, the other, through a materialist statistical average, defined a material worth. It smacks of Spengler too; the timeless peasant, his sole contribution to destiny, his grain and ore.

The problem I have with it is its anthropocentric nature; inevitable perhaps from the time in which these authors wrote yes, yet still. If we were, as I do, to view human society as composed of three separate parts: Genetic. the innate substance of man; mimetic, the means of his social organisation; and finally: Technological, the fruit of his reason; we would view it as overly based on Genetics, the primary matter. It feels like an overly Marxist view, like Junger, living in the times and exposed to the arguments he was, imbibed to much of a factory mindset. Rather than seeing the interplay of the three separate forces, each striving and competing with one another for control of civilisation, he saw it through a Marxist lens, overly concerned with each man each contributing a certain Labour Value to each piece of manufacture.

I think, fundamentally, that the key, and really sole, observation needed to explain today, is the supremacy of technology over both genetic and mimetic efficacy. Neither have managed to keep track with this third and ultimate element and, as such, are as it were being pushed through the mesh that technology of itself creates, resulting in an abomination, as we are forced to behave, both genetically and mimetically, in the way technology, and its equalisingly endless competition, demands.

[Anonymous No.18031047]

>Workers BTFO pretty much forever.

[Anonymous No.18031063]

>>18025251
>Tocqueville, Jünger, and Marx
Stop putting Tocqueville together with retarded hacks

[Anonymous No.18031198]

>>18030859
Good post.

[Anonymous No.18031208]

>>18027127
Workers can obtain what they need for themselves and their own self-improvement today.

[Anonymous No.18031416]

Nice thread, have a bump.

[Anonymous No.18031677]

>>18031063
ur a faget

[Anonymous No.18031804]

>>18030859
I cannot respond fully at the moment, but as a sort of preliminary I think that a question worth keeping in mind is the extent to which technology has increased, or perhaps the opposite, that its nomos has receded, its law eroded. This becomes clear when we think how Jünger's 'technology is the clothing of the worker' can no longer be taken as metaphor. It is all too real, but excessive and one begins to see the shedding of technology itself.

To reframe the question, can we say that our opposition to technology is a force of will greater than that experienced by Nietzsche? Looking back one may see something very different, Nietzsche's arming against technical rationalism occurs as if the enemy forms within the blood. It is not a formative relation, nor an abstraction which encroaches from an external realm, but from within the very blood of the species. In it all time is threatened, the very death of the species begins to reveal itself in all things. Even Nietzsche could not resist what was in the blood, he turned to technical measures as an attempt to rid himself of the disease.

The bourgeois novel is a blueprint left behind of this carmine movement of the blood. In the simplicity of social events one sees a grotesque and dying form of power, the rationalised being still cased in the shell of what would outwardly appear to be a cultured human. One sees the reaching out of the dying limbs of the old courts and families, a metamorphosis of what has completely lost touch with the natural world. The simple destructiveness of the monarchies was already a hidden terror, Tocqueville captured it in perfectly in his image of the King - and with such images there is the sense of killing out of sympathy, a sacrifice that the court could no longer provide for itself. The misery of which the princes and counts kill one another in the metaphysical realm is of an ugliness which could bring an end to the world. Count Bezukhov's unending strokes are beautiful by comparison. This perhaps reveals something providential in the medical relation - a relation to the death world as a correct if not beautiful means of return to this world.

[Anonymous No.18031815]

>>18031804
It is no mistake that the growing anti-technical position becomes a 'herd instinct' at the very moment that technology begins to be shed off by the west, in its economic blindness of the 1960s and 70s, the era of post-industrialisation. Even in Heidegger's time technology is freed of its political order, any sense of sovereign power. With the industrial occupation of Germany one already sees the cataclysm of the European borders, the shedding off of technology into the world dumping grounds. The vacuous aspect of technology without any internal laws should be considered, as should the destructive metamorphosis of the World Wars. The man who builds up immeasurable power cannot retain its material, where he is greater than a king he must also become a slave to the gun. The soldier sheds his armour, his equalisation and leveling only increases his war character. Tocqueville had a vision of this which a Deleuze could not see due to a proximity to the spectral war; the pacifism of civil war and perpetual democracy.

It is hard to imagine that we are more technological than the great industrial cities which had replaced and leveled the churches - caused their ministers and priests to prostrate before the gigantic furnaces, the smoke of the abyss. The totalising monotony is well behind us, and the image of Krupp is lost now:

"They lived in Krupp houses; their babies were delivered by Krupp doctors; their children educated in Krupp schools; they bought at Krupp stores; borrowed books from Krupp libraries; married in the Krupp church; and were buried in the Krupp cemetary."

Tocqueville, Jünger, Goethe, Stendhal, etc. could not have seen such images if they were not closer to it than us, as if having to live upon the smoke as the gods breathe aether. Amazon's supremacy seems quaint by comparison, materially much further reaching, but qualitatively a nothingness - hence the lack of sovereignty in its figures. The same may be said of the other post-technical figures: at best they are putting on a show as a preventative against mechanised exhaustion, but the worst of them have an aesthetic quality informed by the World Vision commercials of the 1980s. The West is left with the aesthetics of starvation pop as its economy, the austerity measures find their herald in the great sinkholes devouring small towns and abandoned nature reservws - the invisible elemental war.

[Anonymous No.18031828]

>>18031815
And this is true of art as well, there is rarely anything of the horror of Mosolov's Zavod, or the Funeral March of the Workers. The industrial precludes any sense of antistrophe, even the utterances of the strophe. In the 1980s conservative youth saw the preserving, museum element of the socialist art of industrial noise, a rot that would save them from commodification and the aseptic culture of technical surviaval. For us the industrial pounding is merely entertainment, a sexual brutalism where the act in itself has been renounced - or even a sentimental call against the racket which cannot be heard or sensed in any way.

Despite its former brutality in it there was also sovereignty, and thus derived a strong type of freedom. The anti-technical not only resents the rationalist and technological world, but also its loss. We have a sense of a great order that we could not measure up to, or at least that all of the elemental exhaustion did not in the end return us to being, the perfection of life. The bourgeois order of technology reigns where a new suitor must be sought - such is the devastating end of the paternal order. Aristophanes warned against the greatest form of war which comes with the body of women; Platonov saw in her the demonic qualities of technology, every babushka as Baba Yaga.

Can the anti-tech position respond to the magical aspects of technology? Especially where it disappears technology will be resistant to any political efforts, particularly those of the rationalist type which unconsciously keeps the technical blood flowing within it.
Technology is a prosthesis, not only as a crutch, a mechanised drug against weakness, but as an escalating force. The prosthesis helps man endure against an excess gravity, and also act against it - the elements which are escaping now become of his dominion. Man wields the negative laws as a form of power.

[Anonymous No.18031854]

>>18031828
That became much more than it should have, but probably worthwhile. I will try to answer you more directly later.
https://youtu.be/wKdFfCGlMYQ
https://youtu.be/fd_E4q84tWQ

[Anonymous No.18032261]

To say that industrial music is only an entertainment is a bit of a gross overstatement. Perhaps it is better to say that such music represents an element in the blood, the higher form of technology as a necessity of the species. That this strengthens where industrial material abandons really heightens the species quality of it.
This would also show the other side, the metaphysical aspects and strength behind something like the 'culture industry'. Tocqueville's war theory as an aesthetics...

[Anonymous No.18032381]

>>18032261
Youre switching too vaguely between the name of the genre and your idiosyncratic idea of the word "industrial" so you can use it as an extension (or prosthesis) of your personal philosophy

[Anonymous No.18032520]

>>18025273
>Even class in the Marxist sense is supposed to dissolve as such after the dictatorial transitional phase
No? The transitional stage and the socialist stage, aka the lower phase of communism, is supposed to entail the international victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoise, after which the dissolution of class can begin. At least according to Marx.

[Anonymous No.18032635]

>>18032381
I mean the music of the industrial, not any particular genre. Industrial as a genre only makes a focus of what is already present in all modern music even classical. It is a specific relation mot all that different, and not a decline as the conservatives would have us think.
My 'personal' philosophy is the exact opposite of a cope. You are simply making up an argument to fit your demand for criticism.

[Anonymous No.18032644]

>>18032520
You're just repeating what he said.

[Anonymous No.18032701]

>>18032644
I mean not really, the transitional phase (in the way the term is used by Marx or Lenin), would be periods like the War Communist period and the NEP period, after that the USSR would not be considered to be in a transitional phase, but rather fully in the socialist or lower communist phase. This might seem like semantic nonsense but the idea of a transitional phase is that there will be a period in which any economic measures necessary are taken to keep a revolution alive and establish the means to enter the socialist phase, it is considered to be this way by everyone who isn't a left communist. This is unfortunately a heated debate on the left. The bits on technology are sort of on the mark though, read The Civil War in France by Marx for his perspective on trying to take over existing structures and institutions, and Dialectics of Nature by Engels for further reading on the relationship between nature and human development according to the the two, if you so desire.

[Anonymous No.18032827]

>>18032701
I think you are taking it too literally. There is an element of Jünger's own philosophy of transition in this fragment, and his point is not to discuss Marxist political mechanisms, so it is unfair to detract from his argument through an analysis of what he did not intend.
It is a simple summary comment, but most likely he would see the Marxist dictatorial phase in the sense of totality, of a world or species order. This really is the meaning of the dictatorship of the proletariat, it is a relation to being and human community. Transition at this height would become the classless order.
He uses the wording of Marx but the essence is different. He does not oppose the ideas, but he also does not think they are complete.

[Anonymous No.18032849]

>>18032827
Fair enough, in that case I just think it would be better to use a different term since that phrase brings about a different idea in the minds of people who have read Marx, which is a purely semantic point. My bad for the incorrect assumption.

[Anonymous No.18033149]

Garbage thread full of pseuds. Go back to r*ddit where long posts = good posts

[Anonymous No.18033183]

>>18032849
I can see that in its own right, however where he is trying to reintroduce hegel back into marx it would be a handicap to abandon marxist terminology.
The writer cannot write only for an audience, in doing so he loses his own thread.

[Anonymous No.18033745]

>>18033149
Now this is some cope.

[Anonymous No.18034329]

>>18033149
Let's see your argument.

[Anonymous No.18034723]

War as inner experience is Chad book number 1

[Anonymous No.18034976]

>>18031804
High quality post.

[Anonymous No.18035104]

>>18032701
>Transitional phase is necessary by everyone who isn't a left communist.
For good reason. Every time there was a revolution the leader and the vanguard party betrayed the people. The Paris commune and Catalonia proved as much.

[Anonymous No.18035307]

>>18034723
I would still like to discuss this, one of the recent threads had some quotes that didn't get much attention.
In the meantime, from one of his later works:
"War is the promoter of technology and science, the destroyer of the musical world. The warrior caste has long since become uneasy with it. Their disempowerment is a special case of the confiscation of the class order in general."

This is an important insight, and hints at what I've said before of the necessity of building an anti-war character in opposite terms to the democratic, in terms of strength. Or a strength of law in relation to Schmitt's partisans.
War cannot be the object in itself, to retreat is not necessarily cowardice nor a betrayal of the warrior spirit. It may be a necessity in an era ruled by donkey kings. The warrior must also know when to return home, especially where the path entails being surrounded in the forest; something higher than war.

At the same time one sees the return of a heroic realism, of the strength of the paternal order even in ruins. The Donbass for example. However, this possibility is very limited, the warriors of today recognise the continued possibility of world destruction, of a war that embroils the entire homeland and its undergrowth - the war which cannot be won is one of the consequences of the Nuremberg occuparion.

Nonetheless, these strategic clashes will have to be resolved, and with each incursion the potential territory of war increases. The geopolitical warnings from Russia of a First Strike should not be taken lightly: there are either continued peace operations or a total war of destruction. The blitz defeat of America against Iran required nothing more than a phone call and the naming of a single Israeli city.

If one wants to salvage the final years of Germany then it is necessary to accept that logistics must be handled first - to gain the upper hand in technical war requires being ahead of mobilisation. This seems an entirely passive relation to war, but it should be remembered that the law of Roman warfare grounded itself.in the descent into the underworld, of the plundering of wealth and its redistribution.
The preliminaries of war remain the sorting out of wealth conditions, of trying to perceive the complexities of a plunder that can be won where there is only mechanised ruination. Nonetheless, the endless treaties are a defense against this possibility, and hint to the fact that victory is still possible.

[Anonymous No.18035335]

>>18035307
The significance of Rome is that it is the only state to ever successfully create a permanent martial order. This is not a warning in the liberalist sense, only a recognition of distances and degrees.
What creates the Centaur figure in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy demands a similar figure for a martial aesthetics. One cannot simply leap in. Xenophon gave us the textbook but it remains uncertain if centaur figures can live in a world of materiel battles.

[Anonymous No.18035657]

As usual, an image is pwrhaps stronger. We see a prelude to our situation in the Indian Wars, the clashing of tomahawk and musket, or the silent tragedy of the Russian peasantry rushing towards machineguns with pitchforks. A final nobility.

A warrior cult within the invisible war must find similar weapons, although we must be wary of accepting losses. Our territory is at the borders of dignity, carvong out the light of new laws rather than defending the old in a certain sacrifice of life forces. The wine of Achilles would be the greatest of weapons to find - the gold of shields demands its greater lustre.

To an extent the masculinist efforts are attempting to find this - a monument to a war physique where the figures are no longer possible. In hopes that some future conservative will find dragon's teeth in the inevitable tearing down of his own monuments. But what is more significant than a museum image of war physique is something like Socrates eye beams - the penetrating elemental vision which resists all death in an opposite way to the society of nations, the defense-oriented and life-denying state.

Verteidigung in der Tiefe will forever remain the highest honour of the Germans - Teutoburg without need of an eagle. Otherwise, we will have the Lay of Igor's Host, or something like it - the great peace of the freed eagle who flies over the territory of the dead. That which has given up on numinous signs must accept perpetual peace.

In terms of technical considerations alone Germany was entirely correct in its war efforts. Its brutality, however, was the result of a blindness to the wealth of the situation. There was no plunder of wealth, of dominion in Goethe's sense, and as such no possibility of victory in the metaphysical or numinous territory.

The same problem of the unsupported infantry, or air power, holds true here, on the invisible ground of war: without numinous support, a wave which follows the infantry forces, as with the Wild Hunt, the force is nothing more than a sacrifice. Advanced nations, after sacrificing the peasantry, are left with the submissive loss of their soldiers. They go with the machines in opposite order to the care of armour demonstrated by ancient soldiers - the collective aegis shield which represents something higher than the fasces.

Modern soldiers are like the crystalline structure of the knife, ever worn away to sharpen the bevel of the homeland.

[Anonymous No.18035665]

>>18033149
Now this is based.

[Anonymous No.18035728]

>>18035665
In short form, one may say that our situation follows Tocqueville's distinction of aristocratic and democratic warfare. Where democracy triumphs over the strength of endurance we must find the operative measures which are greater than the enduring. This heightens the metaphysical aspects of war. The liberal order finds itself in a salient, a kettling of all that which it had defended against - its greatest fears foremost.
The entire war practise of Israel, for example, can be summed up as a wearing away of the world citizenry, especially its own, into moral exhaustion. With each measure the nationless state moves away from the democratic order, while deepening its character. War enters technical perfection, a permament order and territory. And the only possibility of peace begins to appear as the most violent destruction.

[Anonymous No.18035748]

As always these comments are nothing more than philosophical satire. If you take away anything more than that you should be tried for species intersectionalist infringement.

[Anonymous No.18035801]

https://youtu.be/ebkVj0WsRWM
https://youtu.be/ujQBKpjYqfE
https://youtu.be/3hGaOIP9wNg
https://youtu.be/Il3FJMf4mSE

[Anonymous No.18036035]

Wtf am I reading?

[Anonymous No.18036154]

>>18031815
>"They lived in Krupp houses; their babies were delivered by Krupp doctors; their children educated in Krupp schools; they bought at Krupp stores; borrowed books from Krupp libraries; married in the Krupp church; and were buried in the Krupp cemetary."
>Amazon's supremacy seems quaint by comparison, materially much further reaching, but qualitatively a nothingness - hence the lack of sovereignty in its figures.
kek

[Anonymous No.18036317]

>>18025251
Is this Tocqueville? I didn't know he was this based.

[Anonymous No.18036635]

Something that has always stuck with me is Jünger's description of soldiers attempting to discuss war war with citizens at home. There is a divide that cannot be overcome and the homefront can never know the brutal form that war has now taken. There are similar stories from the British, fathers who insist that their sense abandon these lies of brutality.
In it there is the other side of the anti-war character, perhaps even more revealing than pacifism. The man and woman of the homefront come to see themselves as a force greater than war - experiencing not only the whole of its pain nut also its triumphs.

The abandonment of military marches, of martial music, is of this same law. Little more needs to be said of the loss, and certainly the overwrought technicalities of theory only distract further from the essence. What can an Adorno say of war music?

At the same time there has been no replacement for the military marches. The only people to have taken up the aesthetics of the machine gun are the most isolated of the pacifists. The unhoused beings of a movement of the homeless.

One of the old egoist anarchists referred to them as "gutter hippies". The description is telling, as even in homelessness and pacifism they pursue war from a martial order of mendicity. And in them there is little sense of the old adage that every beggar is a king.

Such descriptions should not be taken as an offense. Rather, with them we see that the character of Simplicius has wntered the cities. The growth of a beard as forest moss and with the stench of smouldering ruins may be the greatest image we have of the new species. The austerity measures will come to finality with or without our consent and at the end each of us will have come to bathe in smoke.

There may be some resounding of possibility in what Orff left to us. Compared to the ugly monotony of a Reich or Glass there remain antiquated strengths. Martynov's post-technical efforts thus exist as a transition of great rhtyhms. As he says, no great music can return until the ruins of Europe are recognised. Greatness is reserved, and we can only lay the ground. All of the years of brutal violence could not have had an equal in aesthetics, but then the pounding metres will all return in a single moment.

Pindar's law of music remains true: the hauntimg screams of the Gorgons captured by Athena.

[Anonymous No.18036955]

https://youtu.be/qAzVYCs4BMY

[Anonymous No.18036960]

https://youtu.be/Il3FJMf4mSE

[Anonymous No.18036967]

https://youtu.be/LAy4PkBHdSs

[Anonymous No.18036975]

>>18025251

this is excellent. i was just have a discussion with my boss. he wants to employees to be super specialized...to the point where we have guys that only do a very specific task (trades). i told him: make each employee able to do everything in the trade - train them to be excellent techs. basically i was saying to invest in our workers. sadly he's gone full bore the other way.

[Anonymous No.18036987]

>>18036317
Tocqueville is unironically how some conservatives are coping with capitalist excess in the modern day because they're still too afraid of admitting Marx may have been right about a few things.

[Anonymous No.18036994]

>>18026926
blocked.

[Anonymous No.18037040]

https://youtu.be/sT8WenpR8NI

Race as Perkuns' striking of sun spark into the Daugava.

[Anonymous No.18037372]

https://youtu.be/OUIhkrSmSmE

"The earth is covered more and more densely with turbines and power stations, and not only in the river valleys. More and more diversity, but also stranger and greater abstraction, this is what the circling and spiralling circulations produce. Here substances are divided beyond the limits of imagination and there transformed, here titanic power is developed and there a wealth never imagined is forced from the universe; often the inventive spirit seems to have come very close to the miracle mill Grotta. But invention does not work alone.

The organic world is superimposed on a larger one, just as the fruited land is but a gossamer leaf of the earth. Obviously, organic and inorganic or superorganic forces enter into a new relationship. Telluric powers are stirring, and not them alone. Man's inventiveness is a higher instinct; its roots reach deep down into matter. The mills are focal points where this becomes visible. Here, the unexpected is waiting."
One cannot escape the sense that the image of the worker is also of its opposite, one sees in him the perfection of death, as illustrated in Plato's account – rising from the underworld to the earth, which is still of the sea element. Proteus. Man remains of the Dioscuri, even where Dionysus and Apollo come to be seen as divided, brothers in civil war.

The elements and symbols are a type of congealing; the mill figure is the witch or beautiful troll who can find no other home than the catacombs of the mountain.
The screaming echoes outwards, off into the horizon. The mountains are worn away, divided of the elements; returned to creation.

[Anonymous No.18037528]

This is the most schizo shit I've ever seen here.

[Anonymous No.18038330]

Where to start with Tocqueville?

[Anonymous No.18038403]

>>18035307
>>18035657
Fascinating.

[Anonymous No.18039781]

boys, what did I step in to?

[Anonymous No.18040551]

>>18038330
Democracy

[Anonymous No.18040834]

>>18039781
A based thread.

[Anonymous No.18041298]

This journal note on technology and railroads was posted recently. I would highly recommend Platonov's Among Animals and Plants to anyone interested in this tneme.
In it the railroad forms a transitional territory between the old world and communism.

[Anonymous No.18042240]

>>18025251
Bump

[Anonymous No.18042325]

>>18032701
>This is unfortunately a heated debate on the left.

Because it’s a bunch of bullshit and the primary reason communism is impossible. The idea that the state will wither away after completely centralizing it is hilarious

[Anonymous No.18043026]

>>18042325
"We shall never understand the irresistible force with which the "social question" came to the fore at that time unless we realize that the decline of actual security produced an increasingly sharp and often painful need for it. An uneasy feeling of being exposed to the storms of life without shelter and protection, of floating in a void, then befell and disrupted the individual. Inevitably the social question preoccupied above all the human group which felt its lack of protection most keenly. It was among the industrial workers and in the industrial districts that socialism first became a political movement. The workers' charge that the capitalist who owns the means of production is an exploiter is justified, inasmuch as the production methods of technology are based on exploitation and pillage. But the worker fails to see that he himself is equally guilty of exploitation since he works hand in hand with technological progress and advocates it.
That is why all his efforts to achieve social justice and security are doomed to failure. That is why his plight remains unrelieved even when he lives under governments which he trusts and with which he identifies himself. Even when he demonstrates his power to overthrow capitalism, he lacks the power to master the rationality of technology itself. As a result, he remains captive to the technical apparatus and its organization; his situation remains unchanged. He is bound to be subject to exploitation as long as he himself advocates and supports exploitation. Not actualsecurity, but want of security produces those powerful organizations we see growing up around us, not only labor parties and unions but also private insurance combines and governmental social security bureaus. However, he who craves security, he who calls for protection, can in no way escape from paying the price it costs. To the same extent to which protection is granted, the individual becomes dependent upon the organization that gives the protection. The whole weakness of the human being who lives within the technical organization, his whole peculiar uprootedness, his crying need for guidance and aid, his isolation – they find expression in this striving for security that shrinks from no act of subjection, that surrenders itself into dependence with a definite eagerness. Moreover, since the craving for security grows as fast as actual security declines, we notice a peculiar vicious circle at work: technical progress increases the craving for security, while mushrooming organizations for a sham security produce a decline of actual security."

[Anonymous No.18043044]

>>18043026
"Here we must ask how far organization can be expanded, whether it has limits, and where. In the theory in which statistical and probability calculations have a part, everything is a question of organization, which determines the amount of necessary reserves and calculates the manner of their disposition. This approach is well established; what it amounts to is nothing else but the compulsory organization of every living soul.
But then, our era of increasingly perfect technology may be likened to the mythological Saturn, for, like Saturn who devoured his own children, our age is devouring its own security. Just as total war by its over-expansion annihilates its own means and frustrates its own objectives, so we find the organizations for security invaded by destructive, elementary forces which cannot be controlled by rational thought. Why does the craving for security grow with growing technical perfection? Because, the dangers now becoming visible, the followers of technical progress begin easily to sense the regression which by their very own efforts they have produced. Modern man wakes up to the fact that the elemental forces he has enslaved in his machinery are turning against him with ever growing, viciously destructive force.
To be "socially conscious" today means nothing else than to maintain faith in machinery and organization. Social consciousness is the kowtow of man before the ideology of technical progress. The craving for security may well call forth powerful organizations, but to give man real security is entirely beyond their power. This is not just because the only real security we can ever possess depends upon ourselves, and, being our individual responsibility, cannot be relegated to others; this is not only because these organizations merely distribute or spread poverty; but because these organizations are in themselves already expressions of poverty, worry, misery, and like all scarcity organizations they mushroom just as fast as unorganized wealth declines."

[Anonymous No.18043082]

>>18043044
Jünger's analysis is echoed by Platonov and Camatte, who only come to see the catastrophe of 'organisations against the blood' after witnessing it first-hand.
This is the significance of going back to look at both the simple and metaphysical aspects of economy and the worker, which Tocqueville provides us. There is no excess of political organisation in his images, only the worker in being alone. Marx seems more concerned with technical capacities than either technology or man, even if this was not his intent.

One could perhaps extend Schmitt's view of humanism as that which struggles only against death: the communist extends this right to technology, so that the impoverishment amidst death only deepens.

[Anonymous No.18043147]

>>18043082
This is also what Nietzsche says of wealth, that it always loses its lustre, except when in the hands of the highest.
Marx starts out from a perhaps noble position, the great hope of return to a violent order of being. But the form also creates its essence, the stamp on the coin is a mark of law while the metal tip of a shell determines its latent destructive force. One cannot oppose the banker by wanting to cut the gold out of his mouth - he has none and one is left with nothing but the search for higher murders.
The criminal anarchists understood this from the beginning. It is a sad fact that Marx, in life and form, was less than a graverobber. But at least the anarchists understood the wealth they were after.

[Anonymous No.18043794]

>>18043026
Very nice.

[Anonymous No.18043959]

>>18042325
You havent read Marx

[Anonymous No.18044031]

>>18043147
>This is also what Nietzsche says of wealth, that it always loses its lustre, except when in the hands of the highest
Based.

[Anonymous No.18044805]

"The freedom, which both the principles of nationalism and socialism are able to shape, is not of a substantial nature; it is a premise, a mobilizing source, but it is no goal. From this relationship it can be assumed that the bourgeois concept of freedom is in play here in some fashion, and that it is a matter of efforts still involving both the ‘individual’ and the ‘mass’ to a considerable extent.
As practice shows, th is is really the case. Social atomisation on the inside, and the national segregation of the body of the state on the outside are both tendencies which belong to the natural stock-in-trade of every liberal world view; there is no social contract or international convention during the Nineteenth Century and up to the Weimar Constitution or the Treaty of Versailles, in which these tendencies do not occupy a decisive place. These things belong to the very basic level at which all is worked out, such as, for instance, the fact that everyone can read and write; and there is no order, whether of restoration or any kind of revolution, which will not have recourse to this fact. One must see, nonetheless, that this is not a matter of goals for the state, but of premises for the construction of the state.

Within the world of work, these principles are dimensions of work and mobilization, whose effect is more destructive than the capacity of liberal democracy to grasp how it is attacked with its own methods. The fact that, in this process, something greater and more important is occurring than a mere process of self-destruction of democracy must be proven to the extent that in these words a new and different meaning comes to light, in which the effort of a breed destined to dominion is revealed. We stand in a process through which the general principles are given direction and in which “freedom from” changes into a “freedom for”. In this context, socialism appears as the premise for the sharpest authoritarian structure, whilst nationalism appears as the premise for tasks of imperial order."

[Anonymous No.18045631]

Copying this here

------

Essentially there cannot be a Nietzschean attack on capitalism because there is no power in it. At most it is the herd instincts of the valueless, a nihilism which reverts to the domestic sphere because of technology. Which is of the same problem as the luddites, although strangely to a lesser degree. The luddites did not see the full extent of what they faced, and so became a part of its destructive force. Machine destruction is already written into its form as an element, in the same way that the monarchies created the installations for the revoutionaries, those who destroyed machinery only participated in its greater law of movement, of transportation. One must see the invisible forces before he is capable of understanding power.

A Nietzschean attack on capitalism would look like Chaplin cooking with dynamite (as Jünger refers to). The dough absorbs the explosiveness, it is beyond Comedy. Even the anarchists approach a blind pessimism when they come to see that science holds an infinitely greater destructive power. You can't blow up a social relationship, and even less so its formative laws. Anarchist direct action thus becomes a sort of petulent tinkering, a luddism returned to the museums for those who are unconsciously comedic technicians.

Even lower than the anarchists, communist organising is reduced to a feminine managerialism - the fool on the corner selling his rags was always a babushka street capitalist, selling domestic wares that are unwanted even by failing industry. Forever one with the deepest crisis. The Berlin Wall is already in the street character of all industrial cities, and at the boundaries - opposite to the genius which exists in Roman roads. But its character remains formative rather than divisive. In the image of the women industrialists in the economically defeated Moscow we see the final funeral procession for the worker - socialism died well before this.

This was already hinted at by Plato, blind wealth is a sort of 'herd instinct' of metaphysical laws. The economic itself is unworthy of mention, it does not even register as the lowest of values

[Anonymous No.18046196]

>Central to the worker is not his own being, nor even character - he is rather the ground from which the new species is formed
Holy cringe

[Anonymous No.18046210]

>>18026926
based

[Anonymous No.18046510]

>>18046196
Why so many pseuds?

[Anonymous No.18046721]

Based de Tocqueville once again proving that lit doesn't read.

[Anonymous No.18048038]

Bump

[Anonymous No.18048899]

B

[Anonymous No.18050396]

B

[Anonymous No.18050640]

Crossposting this.

I mean that there is neither power in capitalism nor the attack against it. Capitalism is only the domestic aspect of an era with much greater purpose than selling food in cans. At most it is only ever a means of power, its sustenance.

The question cannot be one of efficiency, great organisations of economy only arise because of the vast military operations of the modern era - they are like field kitchens in one moment, but must resort to desperate plunder in another. Efficiency is a bourgeois concern of security, and is seen as foolishness where there is immeasurable wealth. What is the wasting of a can of food, or even entire container ships, in the face of continents which are not yet turned to deserts?

The slightest waste is everything to the field cook, but also the starving soldier - only for each in their own way. Economics cannot answer such questions, nor can anything material answer what lies behind it. There can only be the outward appearance of forces, but never that which resides within. This contributes to the elemental destruction, the world-weakening.

The real question, from a nietzschean perspective, is where is the power? Without knowing this it can be neither supported nor attacked. Where one retreats into economic questions he has resigned himself against this, and stands for domesticity, the reordering of the smallest affairs. He abandons even the order of questioning. To attempt to force a civil war of this, which is what revolution really is (only unconsciously), is doomed from the start. To force the money changers out during the transitional phase is only to make a temple of their act.

If the failed revolutions of the communists (and I mean this in the sense that they fail even in their clownish attempts at organising for the revolution) have taught us anything it is that the will of the modern era is not economic in nature. For Nietzsche, the power of the modern era lies in the creation of a new species. Economics has never possessed this formative level of power, and never will. It cannot enter into the blood of man, and certainly not his essence, what gives new life. The economy is merely a mark of this essence, and is always limited to its era. The owl on the face of the coin speaks to athena, but also Hermes.

It is the life-giving power which is the question, and economics are always a step away from this - hence fasting in the Abrahamic religions, the fall into a nihilism of the guts was foreseen, perhaps due to their proximity to the transitional forces. Marx's economic contradictionism says less than the old Christian fables, the Carmina Burana, the Flemish Proverbs. Economy is domestic concern reduced to its technical aspects, or in other words, the sustenanceof law where it can only sense survival at its most austere - pain reduced to impoverishment.

https://youtu.be/RIq5FSPtPjM

[Anonymous No.18050656]

>>18025273
>"Even class in the Marxist sense is supposed to dissolve as such after the dictatorial transitional phase. As current politics in the socialist countries confirm, this does not seem easy. It should also be considered whether our ways of life are not shaped much more by technology than by socialism. Society is trying to adapt to the means – first steam power, then electricity, and now nuclear technology. Primary however, in terms of the shape of the worker, are neither the technical nor the social structures; their changes are more like the consequences of an eruption."
Total false dichotomy.

[Anonymous No.18050729]

>>18050656
How so?

[Anonymous No.18052525]

>>18030859
>It feels like an overly Marxist view, like Junger, living in the times and exposed to the arguments he was, imbibed to much of a factory mindset. Rather than seeing the interplay of the three separate forces, each striving and competing with one another for control of civilisation, he saw it through a Marxist lens, overly concerned with each man each contributing a certain Labour Value to each piece of manufacture.
Can you explain this?

[Anonymous No.18052955]

>>18025251
Semi-related, but does anyone have the Warosu links for the spate of great Junger threads recently?

[Anonymous No.18053923]

>>18050656
No it's not.

[Anonymous No.18053970]

>>18036987
Patrick Deneen comes to mind, the guy is a very strong example of this exact thing. A Christian conservative who has to come to terms with the fact that capitalism is the force that actually erodes all the things such a conservative sees as good.

Of course, Karl Marx saw this coming 150 years ago and told the reactionaries and conservatives of that time that capitalism will be that which causes all that is solid to melt into air.

[Anonymous No.18054582]

>>18052955
Discussion One

>>>>/lit/thread/S17138742
Discussion Two

>>>>/lit/thread/S17268778

>>>>/lit/thread/S17285979
Discussion Three

>>/lit/thread/S17401170

Searching Jünger Hölderlin will likely give a number of threads.

[Anonymous No.18054587]

>>18054582
Those are the worker threads.

[Anonymous No.18055767]

>>18054582
Thank you so much.

[Anonymous No.18055790]

>>18043959
>planned economy

Yikers.

[Anonymous No.18056404]

>>18052955
This has been one of the best ones
>>/lit/thread/S17864444#p17869820

[Anonymous No.18057245]

bump

[Anonymous No.18057565]

what´s up with the romanticization of the "worker"? what makes the worker a higher ideal than for example an aristocratic gentleman?

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!bGBGaUpA8kS No.18057623]

>>18055790
*all of China looks disapprovingly in your direction*

[Anonymous No.18058038]

>>18057565
It is an inevitability rather than a romanticisation. One could even say that the monarchy and its court had already demonstrated the will of the worker - through mechanisation of power and wealth which would become installations for the revolutionary forces.
Rivarol warned of this in the French Revolution, that in arming the passions of the multitude an even greater enemy is formed, one which will destroy the monarchy with more force than the monastic enemies. And Tocqueville sees this as far back as the 12th or 13th century: the monarchy turns against itself in the centralisation of power, which, at the same time, increases the democratic will.

For Jünger the worker is similarly providential, it is a law of the era. So even if it is not an ideal situation we must measure up to it, raise it to its highest strength.

[Anonymous No.18058537]

>>18053970
"Tocqueville was one of the vanquished. All forms of defeat converged in him, and not accidentally and only unluckily, but rather fatefully and existentially. As an aristocrat, he was on the losing side in the civil war, the worst kind of war, which also brings with it the worst kind of defeat. He belonged to the social class that was defeated by the French Revolution. As a liberal, he foresaw the no longer liberal Revolution of 1848 and was fatally affected by the outbreak of its horrors. As a Frenchman, he belonged to the nation that was defeated by England, Russia, Austria, and Prussia after a 20-year coalition war. Thus he was on the losing side in an international world war. As a European, he found himself in the role of the defeated, for he foresaw the development that, over Europe’s head, made two new powers, America and Russia, into the bearers and inheritors of an irresistible centralization and democratization. Finally, as a Christian—which he remained in accordance with the beliefs of his fathers, through baptism and tradition—he succumbed to the scientific agnosticism of the age.
Nevertheless he did not become what he, more than any other, seemed predestined to be: a Christian Epimetheus. He lacked the footing in salvific history that would preserve his historical idea of Europe against despair. Europe was lost without the idea of a katechon.6 Tocqueville knew no katechon. Instead he sought intelligent compromises. He himself felt the weakness of these compromises just as did his opponents, who for that reason mocked him.
Thus he became one of the vanquished who accepted his defeat. C’est un vaincu qui accepte sa défaite [“only someone defeated accepts his defeat”]. Guizot said this of him, and Sainte-Beuve spread it eagerly around. It was ill meant. The literary critic uses it as a poisoned arrow in order to fatally strike the famous historian. But God alters the meaning of such spiteful remarks and makes them into the testimony of an unwanted and unexpected depth of insight. In this way the viciously intended phrase can even serve to help us divine the secret [arcanum] of the greatness that elevates the defeated Frenchman above all other historiographers of his century.

[Anonymous No.18058551]

>>18058537
5
In the autumn of 1940, as France lay defeated on the ground, I had a discussion with a Yugoslavian, the Serbian poet Ivo Andrić, whom I love very much. We had met in a shared connoisseurship and in the veneration of Léon Bloy. The Serb told me the following story from the mythology of his people: Marko Kraljević, the hero of the Serbian saga, fought for an entire day with a powerful Turk and laid him out after a hard struggle. As he killed the defeated enemy, a serpent that had been sleeping upon the heart of the dead man awoke and spoke to Marko: You were lucky that I slept through your battle. Then the hero cried out: Woe is me! I killed a man who was stronger than me!
I retold this story to some friends and acquaintances at the time and also to Ernst Jünger, who was stationed as an officer of the army of occupation in Paris. We were all deeply impressed. But it was clear to us that the victors of today do not allow themselves to be impressed by such medieval stories. This, too, belongs to your great prognosis, poor, defeated Tocqueville!"

[Anonymous No.18058587]

>>18056404
There seems to be some interest in that one, I'll have to think about it further. The Schmitt quote I just posted is somewhat related to what I said of masculinity being a substratum of higher forces, both within the blood and the elements, so it can be at times an unknown to us.

[Anonymous No.18058740]

>>18058038
it seems so silly to me, so the worker is the mass of people right?
i prefer the notion of the aristocractic of the soul by evola

[Anonymous No.18058823]

Friedrich Georg Jünger predicted dogecoin
>>/lit/thread/S17401055#p17408321

[Anonymous No.18058977]

>>18058740
I don't think they are opposed, and Evola respected Jünger's The Worker.
It is not a mass, but the very theological form of the modern era. The mass, proletariat, fascist soldiers etc. are various types of the form. (Although Jünger positions against the mass, it is an old law which is also abandoned by modern power, contradicting much of conservative thought, or reactions to 'the herd'.)

One may look to the myth of Hephaestus, does he not approach something higher than beauty, even though he is further crippled and exiled by the other gods? In the creation of the great heroic shields he forms a silent and elemental vengeance. In this there is something higher than divinity and art. The worker searches out , just as Hephaestus, these primordial laws, what is formative in its hidden destructive power.

We cannot assume that the destruction of the aristocracy is without a higher purpose. Looking back one can clearly see the part it played in the decline, perhaps even demanding its own overthrow. The black blood of the Habsburgs being an obvious example.

Somehow Bruegel and Bosch saw deeper into the demonic fate of the machines than we are capable of, and it has little to do with the mass of machines themselves, or even their material destructiveness.

[Anonymous No.18059013]

>>18058977
And obviously, Jünger had the figure of the worker.
I cannot really speak for Evola, but for Jünger these are neither concepts, notions, or ideals, they are earth forces which cannot be resisted.
There is a point where anything of aristocratic values can be taken from you, and we cannot be concerned with the soul alone, at least not as something separate from us.
The oldest lesson: one must also know how to live as a beggar if he is to be a king.

[Anonymous No.18059058]

>>18058977
>>18059013
interesting, thanks for the reply

[Anonymous No.18059131]

This thread has certifiably confirmed my suspicions that I am, for all intents and purposes, functionally illiterate at the age of 24.

[Anonymous No.18059170]

>>18059013
>figure of the worker
Figure of the anarch

[Anonymous No.18060191]

>>18059131
Reading a lot shouldn't be that important in your early 20s.

[Anonymous No.18061472]

>>18057623
Oh no

[Anonymous No.18062224]

>>18031047
What a
Shitty poem

[Anonymous No.18062238]

>>18043959
Both paragraphs are saying the same stuff though

[Anonymous No.18062247]

>>18059131
It also confirmed to me that /lit/ is full of r*ddit pseuds

[Anonymous No.18063139]

>>18062247
How?

[Anonymous No.18063460]

>>18058587
I have a print of the thread; you can have it

[Anonymous No.18064679]

>>18031047
What is this?

[Anonymous No.18064853]

>>18058740

[Anonymous No.18065994]

>>18064853
Worker Chads

[Anonymous No.18067330]

>>18055790
What's wrong with having a plan?

[Anonymous No.18067699]

>>18062247
It's pretty sad. A thread like this would have gotten more attention a few years ago