Dyscommunication

CHAPTER 4: The Proletariat as Subject and Representation

Fascist totalitarianism's “organizational form” was “inspired by the totalitarian party that had first been tested and developed in Russia”. (“Fascism was [is] a desperate attempt to defend the bourgeois economy from the dual threat of crisis and proletarian subversion, a state of siege in which capitalist society saved itself by giving itself an emergency dose of rationalization in the form of massive state intervention.“) “Although fascism rallies to the defense of the main icons of a bourgeois ideology that has become conservative (family, private property, moral order, patriotism), while mobilizing the petty bourgeoisie and the unemployed workers who are panic-stricken by economic crises or disillusioned by the socialist movement's failure to bring about a revolution, it is not itself fundamentally ideological. It presents itself as what it is—a violent resurrection of myth calling for participation in a community defined by archaic pseudovalues: race, blood, leader. Fascism is ... the most costly method of preserving the capitalist order....” (Thesis 109, p 55)

'Three years after Stalin's death (1953), the new Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev initiated a “deStalinization” campaign, beginning with a “secret” report ... entitled “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences.” later the same year ... Khrushchev sent Russian tanks to crush the Hungarian revolution.' (Note 110, pp 134–135)

'the expressions of internal negation ... first became visible to the outside world when the workers of East Berlin revolted against the bureaucrats and demanded a “government of steel workers”—a negation which has in one case has already gone to the point of sovereign workers councils in Hungary.' (Thesis 111, p 57)

bureaucratic society is the total opposite of proletarian community. Bureaucratic power is based on possession of a nation-state and it must ultimately obey the logic of this reality, in accordance with the particular interests imposed by the level of development of the country it possesses. 'socialism in a single country' that Stalin was shrewd enough to maintain by destroying the revolutions in China in 1927 and Spain in 1937. The autonomous bureaucratic revolution in China [1949]—as already shortly before in Yugoslavia [1946]—introduced into the unity of the bureaucratic world a dissolutive germ that has broken it up in less than twenty years. workers of East Berlin . . . : reference to the East German revolt of 1953. workers councils in Hungary: Although the 1956 Hungarian revolt against Russian domination was ostensibly rallied around the liberalizing regime of Imry Nagy, the country was in reality organized by a network of nationally coordinated workers councils. See Andy Anderson's Hungary '56. See also the situationists' analysis of the 1968 “Prague Spring” (SI Anthology, pp. 256-265; Expanded Edition, pp. 326–336). this crumbling of the global alliance based on the bureaucratic hoax is also a very unfavorable developement for the future of capitalist society: In his “Preface to the Third French Edition of The Society of the Spectacle” (1992; included in Donald Nicholson-Smith's translation of The Society of the Spectacle, Zone Books, 1994, pp. 7–10), Debord noted that this process, which scarcely anyone else had noticed at the time, had rapidly accelerated since the “fall of the Berlin Wall” in 1989.

(Note 111, pp 135–136)