In the wake of the collapse of ‘really existing’ socialism, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then the greater Soviet Union between the late 80’s and early 90’s, a state of triumphalism emanated from the Western nations who had been locked in an ideological battle with the aforementioned for almost the best part of a century.
This became known as ‘the end of history’, as a jubilant and perhaps over enthusiastic statement by the philosopher Francis Fukuyama became a story that the whole world seemingly wanted to believe in. Indeed, there was a willingness (perhaps Millenarian in nature, as we fast approached the year 2000) to ‘wrap up history, for good‘, something Paulo Virno suggests in his book Deja Vu.
And, after the 20th century, who could blame us all for collectively willing for a 21st century where nothing ever happens again? Of course, a desire for a world where nothing ever happens again largely emanated from societies with at least enough privilege to be free of the necessity to keep fighting for a future. And this is why, ten years later, the 9/11 terror spectacle had such a world-shattering impact on peoples in Western countries.
However, the philosopher Jacques Derrida, perhaps realising what was at stake, wrote perhaps the most enduring rebuff of the idea that Communism, and Marx in particular, was now merely something for history books.
Beginning by referring to the opening line of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, that “A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Communism.” Derrida explores the nature of a haunting, to argue that ghosts cannot be exercised until the situation that has conjured the haunting in question has itself been exercised – which in this case is capitalism itself.
Marx couldn’t simply be “defanged… [and] then become[] just a philosopher like any other”. Marx may be singular (the man, the philosopher) but Marx is also ‘plural’ – visible in every cry of injustice caused by, and unsolvable under capitalism.
Capitalism cannot exist without the spectres of Marx. And never before was this as obvious as in a moment when any tangible alternative to capitalism was being erased.
But there is one other spectre/figure that haunts our capitalist world. This spectre haunts our world in opposition to Marx, and is the only one with the calibre and capacity to stalk our society like that of Marx: Hitler.
Like the spectres of Marx, the spectres of Hitler will forever haunt a capitalist society, built, as it will always be, upon colonialist and supremacist foundations. And like Marx, the spectre of Hitler can only be exercised when the conditions created by capitalist relations are no more.
Both began to increasingly haunt us more perniciously after the 2008 financial crash. Yet I’m not parroting the lazy liberal statement of ‘two extremes’ that begin to mirror one another. Although the spectres of Hitler arise in the same spaces as the spectres of Marx, the spaces where one must ask “what is to be done?” (about the problems of poverty, alienation, war, exploitation, and now mental health and the global climate), what the worm-tongue of Hitler quietly whispers in ones ear couldn’t more different in nature.
This is because the spectres of Hitler deal with injustice as inconvenience. And this is just about endurable in a more stable time, as was the situation in most Liberal democracies both after WW2 and after 1990. But in a time like ours, defined by crises, the spectres of Hitler develop a pathology that I’d call ‘final solutionist’, named after…well, we all know what it’s named after.
Haven’t we all been feeling sick and impotent as we watch the bombs fall on Palestinians in real time over social media? I suspect it’s a collective agreement almost all of us share in silence. Yet alongside this I have also noticed that some of us have found any way possible to stand up for what Israel is doing. I believe, at heart, whether they are aware of it or not, it is a ‘final solutionist’ pathos, ‘the spectres of Hitler‘.
It is a desire ‘just get rid of the issue [aka the Palestinians] quicker’. And it’s the same attitude you see in mundane conversations over cups of tea in Wetherspoons pubs about migrants crossing the sea: “Don’t care how [even if they drown] just get rid of ’em;.
Yet it would unfair here to focus entirely on stereotypical ‘red-wall’ voters, who may sometimes say the quiet bits out loud.
It’s actually within our silence, the spaces where we don’t make some obscene utterance where the spectres of Hitler are most pervasive. The spectres of Hitler reflect off our sunglasses, as we sit so civilised and politely outside cafes and bars on our gentrified city streets. The spectres of Hitler stalk us as we escape for the weekend on cute country walks. Although it’s the spectres of Marx who call our names as we encounter the army the homeless who haunt our city streets, it’s the silence of Hitler that we find easier to accommodate as we proceed to ghost them. Because at some mute level, a level quiet enough so that we don’t believe it is spoken by ourselves, we wish they could all be erased.
This isn’t an appeal to morality, to make you feel immoral, to make you feel bad. The spectres of Hitler whisper in all our ears. We thought that history was over, we believed that the upheavals and horrors of the 20th century had no repercussions awaiting the next century.
We believed in the dream-work called ‘the end of history’, and even as it becomes increasingly untenable, as we are hit by crisis after crisis, as our personal crises start to overlap, as we struggle to keep up, the ‘end of history’ dream-work of a flattened world, where every contradiction is ironed out into another consumable equivalent seems a far easier story to live a life in accordance with. The push (by ourselves as much as the government) to get ‘back to normal’ during the pandemic was testament to this.
Yes, I am also this person; stressed, overwhelmed, listening to rainwater and coastal sounds on Youtube to try to find peace in a world in which there will be no more ruptures, even as they abound around me. But as I ‘de-stress’ I am haunted not by the spectres of Marx, but by the spectres of Hitler, who promise to ‘make it all go away’.
To maintain our ‘normal’, a flat world where nothing changes, it is the spectres of Hitler that have to perform the background work. Background work that has concrete consequences to the point, that in some abstract way it isn’t hard to see how the entire Israeli nation (for example) has been set up as a murderous meat puppet to prop up this existence in the greater Western world. And once the inconveniences become too loud to ignore, let’s remember that those ‘ugly’ people who wish to see the Israeli’s simply ‘get on with it’, are only saying the quiet part out loud.
But this is the point, existence is all that this situation enables. Life can exist nowhere in a world where active genocide is taking place before our eyes. To allow our world to be permeated by the spectres of Hitler is to maintain existence at the expense of life itself.
I am no heroic Marxist. I am you, perhaps more so. Existence is often all that we feel we can do, when we are burnout, stressed and lacking the ability to find it in ourselves to imagine life lived differently.
But I refuse to accept the given, even as I struggle to pick up a finger in active opposition. I maintain the right to exist in the faith that one day I will find that strength, and that one day I will feel the burning hope of an alternative within me once more. It must be there, somewhere.
John B Ledger 