YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION (WELL, YOU KNOW…)

ARENDT ON THE INTERMINABLE PLURALISM OF THE REVOLUTIONARY TRADITION

This is another quite long post, again maybe more in the way of something verging on being a scholarly paper. And for reasons both concerned with providing readers the fullest opportunity to absorb what’s here, as well as logistic challenges arising from the next series on the horizon, this post will be followed by some space to breath, put up your feet, and give it a thorough perusing. I think there’s some fascinating and fertile insights in what follows. So, a little extra time to absorb it may well be a blessing.

As I continue to work on the upcoming, lengthy history of guilds (a lot of work there), I thought I'd tease that a bit with a post that touched on a kindred stream of politics and scholarship. I'm guessing it's a slice of history with which most readers here are unfamiliar. It's also an interesting case of my observation in a recent audio post that – if one understands the true, original meaning of the political designations of left and right – most of what's today called right is really left, and some of what's called left is really right. Though I suppose those of you who have been with me through my discovery of Jean-Claude Michéa will hardly be surprised to hear that claim. 

Another interesting angle to this discussion is to acknowledge that as decisive as we've established was the French Revolution in advancing the spatialist/nascent managerial class regime of monist sovereignty, even amid it can be observed pluralist shoots sprouting out in defiance of that monist sovereignty regime. And I'm not referring here to previously discussed peasant revolts, but rather to pluralist rumblings at the very heart of France's epoch-changing revolution. In Paris itself! And indeed this will be but an early manifestation of a multi-centuries long battle between monist and pluralist tendencies, we might even say traditions, within the history of Europe's emergent revolutionary modernism. 

There has been some valuable histories written on this topic, some of which I'll refer to in what follows. However I want to focus on a theoretical framing of this topic that is especially fertile from the perspective of pluralist restoration animating this Substack. That theoretical framing comes from the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt. While her framing is certainly open to criticism, which I've addressed in the past and will be also referenced below, it is rich in insight and provides a valuably nuanced parsing of some of the milestone moments of the spatialist victories in the phenotype wars. For it turns out that even within these evidently historical triumphs of spatial monism, a pluralist sensibility not only persisted, but constantly rose as an alternative and a challenge to the hegemony of that spatial monism. 

That alternative and challenge, from a pluralist perspective, had serious limitations, the nature and roots of which too will be addressed below. But considering how dark so many people are finding the present state of the world, as spatialism appears to be joyously careening off the civilizational cliff, there may be value – perhaps as much for morale-boosting as pragmatic considerations – in appreciating the extent to which the pluralist alternative is never that far away, and indeed is constantly simmering just under the surface of the spatial regime, however hegemonic may appear to be that regime. 

So, in standard fashion around these parts, let’s begin by giving Arendt a long leash in spelling out in her own words her framing of the revolutionary tradition. While she writes on this topic in numerous works, here we’ll restrict ourselves to her seminal book addressing it: On Revolution, originally published in 1964.¹ And where better to begin than in the midst of the French Revolution itself:

The famous forty-eight sections of the Parisian Commune had their origin in the lack of duly constituted popular bodies to elect representatives and to send delegates to the National Assembly. These sections, however, constituted themselves immediately as self-governing bodies, and they elected from their midst no delegates to the National Assembly, but formed the revolutionary municipal council, the Commune of Paris, which was to play such a decisive role in the course of the Revolution. Moreover, side by side with these municipal bodies, and without being influenced by them, we find a great number of spontaneously formed clubs and societies—the sociétés populaires—whose origin cannot be traced at all to the task of representation, of sending duly accredited delegates to the National Assembly, but whose sole aims were, in the words of Robespierre, ‘to instruct, to enlighten their fellow citizens on the true principles of the constitution, and to spread a light without which the constitution will not be able to survive’; for the survival of the constitution depended upon ‘the public spirit’, which, in its turn, existed only in ‘assemblies where the citizens [could] occupy themselves in common with these [public] matters, with the dearest interests of their fatherland’. To Robespierre, speaking in September 1791 before the National Assembly, to prevent the delegates from curtailing the political power of clubs and societies, this public spirit was identical with the revolutionary spirit.

She goes on though a bit further down her text:

However, no sooner had Robespierre risen to power and become the political head of the new revolutionary government—which happened in the summer of 1793, a matter of weeks, not even of months, after he had uttered some of the comments which I have just quoted—than he reversed his position completely. Now it was he who fought relentlessly against what he chose to name ‘the so-called popular societies’ and invoked against them ‘the great popular Society of the whole French people’, one and indivisible.

The latter, alas, in contrast to the small popular societies of artisans or neighbours, could never be assembled in one place, since no ‘room would hold all’; it could exist only in the form of representation, in a Chamber of Deputies who assumedly held in their hands the centralized, indivisible power of the French nation.

What starts to emerge from her analysis, as will seen further fleshed out below, is an analysis of a suppressed history of revolutionary modernity. Wherever modernity’s revolutions take hold, there is a spontaneous movement among people to create pluralist institutions, that are localized, decentralized, and often federalized. However, time and again, an alternate strain of the revolutionary tradition – that of the nation, the government, the state, the party – the aspiring new monist sovereign works to undermine and suppress that pluralist tradition: even if initially that undermining begins as a celebratory cooptation. In Arendt’s studied opinion (much in keeping you’ll recall with the assessment of Robert Nisbet), the conceptual root of this emerging spatial regime can be traced back to one of the great theorists of “popular” monist sovereignty, Jean Jacques Rousseau. Though, she acknowledges that (like Marx, as I’ve noted in the past) some extent of his influence may well lie in the polysemic interpretations to which his analysis lent itself:

That this conflict between government and the people, between those who were in power and those who had helped them into it, between the representatives and the represented, turned into the old conflict between rulers and ruled and was essentially a struggle for power is true and obvious enough to stand in no need of further demonstration. Robespierre himself, before he became head of government, used to denounce ‘the conspiracy of the deputies of the people against the people’ and the ‘independence of its representatives’ from those they represented, which he equated with oppression. Such accusations, to be sure, came rather naturally to Rousseau’s disciples, who did not believe in representation to begin with—‘a people that is represented is not free, because the [General] will cannot be represented’; but since Rousseau’s teachings demanded the union sacrée, the elimination of all differences and distinctions, including the difference between people and government, the argument, theoretically, could as well be used the other way round. And when Robespierre had reversed himself and had turned against the societies, he could have appealed again to Rousseau and could have said with Couthon that so long as the societies existed ‘there could be no unified opinion’.

And Robespierre was hardly the only French revolutionary (and as we’ll see, revolutionary of spatial modernism and nascent managerial class agent, generally) who was inclined to rhetorically coopt the pluralist shoots of the revolution when tactically expedient, yet strategically denounce and even suppress them when deemed necessary.

…²
Saint-Just—writing at about the same time that Robespierre still defended the rights of the societies against the Assembly—had in mind these new promising organs of the republic, rather than the pressure groups of the Sans-Culottes, when he stated: ‘The districts of Paris constituted a democracy which would have changed everything if, instead of becoming the prey of factions, they would have conducted themselves according to their own proper spirit. The district of the Cordeliers, which had become the most independent one, was also the most persecuted one’—since it was in opposition to and contradicted the projects of those who happened to be in power. But Saint-Just, no less than Robespierre, once he had come into power, reversed himself and turned against the societies.

Though Arendt is rarely cited as a theorist or proponent of federalism, due probably to the dispersed distribution of her observations on federalism, across so many works, with none (far as I know) specifically focused on that subject, federalism was a central pillar of her notion of a sustainably free society. And it was above all the suppression of this federalist disposition within the pluralist tradition of the revolutionary era that she perceived as being the target of hostile monist sovereignty.

...it is therefore of no small importance to note that the societies, in distinction from the clubs, and especially from the Jacobin club, were in principle non-partisan, and that they ‘openly aimed at the establishment of a new federalism’.

Robespierre and the Jacobin government, because they hated the very notion of a separation and division of powers, had to emasculate the societies as well as the sections of the Commune; under the condition of centralization of power, the societies, each a small power structure of its own, and the self-government of the Communes were clearly a danger for the centralized state power.

In Arendt’s estimation “the conflict between the Jacobin government and the revolutionary societies was fought over three different issues.” These were, 1) public freedom against overwhelming odds of private misery; 2) the fight for a unified public opinion, a “general will,” against the public spirit, the diversity inherent in freedom of thought and speech; and 3) the fight of “the government’s monopoly of power against the federal principle with its separation and division of power, that is, the fight of the nation-state against the first beginnings of a true republic.”³ Her use of the phrase, popularized by Proudhon, “the federal principle,” suggests the intellectual genealogy of her own elaboration of this concept. Yet, particularly important to her analytical framing is that those who “discovered” this principle had found it in pragmatic practice (what I’d have called their “recursive social action”). As we’ll see, this emphasis upon spontaneous emergence plays a major role in Arendt’s political philosophy.

…

...the federal principle—practically unknown in Europe and, if known, nearly unanimously rejected—came to the fore only in the spontaneous organizational efforts of the people themselves, who discovered it without even knowing its proper name. For if it is true that the Parisian sections had originally been formed from above for purposes of election for the Assembly, it is also true that these electors’ assemblies changed, of their own accord, into municipal bodies which from their own midst constituted the great municipal council of the Parisian Commune. It was this communal council system, and not the electors’ assemblies, which spread in the form of revolutionary societies all over France.

But, as Arendt sees the recurring story of revolutionary modernism, monist sovereignty eventually triumphs over these promising shoots of pluralism within the very breast of the French revolution:

…
Only a few words need to be said about the sad end of these first organs of a republic which never came into being. They were crushed by the central and centralized government, not because they actually menaced it but because they were indeed, by virtue of their existence, competitors for public power.
…
...the way to dominate the Assembly was to infiltrate and eventually to take over the popular societies, to declare that only one parliamentary faction, the Jacobins, was truly revolutionary, that only societies affiliated with them were untrustworthy, and that all other popular societies were ‘bastard societies’.
…
Robespierre’s rule of terror was indeed nothing else but the attempt to organize the whole French people into a single gigantic party machinery—‘the great popular Society is the French people’—through which the Jacobin club would spread a net of party cells all over France; and their tasks were no longer discussion and exchange of opinions, mutual instruction and information on public business, but to spy upon one another and to denounce members and non-members alike.
…
...we are confronted even in the midst of the French Revolution with the conflict between the modern party system and the new revolutionary organs of self-government. These two systems, so utterly unlike and even contradictory to each other, were born at the same moment. The spectacular success of the party system and the no less spectacular failure of the council system were both due to the rise of the nation-state, which elevated the one and crushed the other, whereby the leftist and revolutionary parties have shown themselves to be no less hostile to the council system than the conservative or reactionary right.⁴

…

Arendt interprets her own analysis as uncovering a relentless battle between persistent-though-incompatible principles of human action and political aspirations, manifesting as competing systems. The same struggle rears its head again in 1848; during the Paris Commune of 1871; amid both Russian Revolutions; as part of the post-WWI “council movements” within Germany and Hungary; and eventually in the failed Hungarian revolution of 1956. (I don’t know of her ever addressing the parallel events in Poland, and she died five years too soon to see the earth shaking triumph of Solidarity.)

…

...the conflict between the two systems has actually always been a conflict between parliament, the source and seat of power of the party system, and the people, who have surrendered their power to their representatives; for no matter how successfully a party may ally itself with the masses in the street and turn against the parliamentary system, once it has decided to seize power and establish a one-party dictatorship, it can never deny that its own origin lies in the factional strife of parliament, and that it therefore remains a body whose approach to the people is from without and from above.

Even those historians whose sympathies were clearly on the side of revolution and who could not help writing the emergence of popular councils into the record of their story regarded them as nothing more than essentially temporary organs in the revolutionary struggle for liberation; that is to say, they failed to understand to what an extent the council system confronted them with an entirely new form of government, with a new public space for freedom which was constituted and organized during the course of the revolution itself.

As disappointed as Arendt was by the long history of the historians, with their monist (managerial class!) sympathies, toward the end she did acknowledge a movement in the historiographic literature toward better and more sympathetic regard of this heterarchical pluralist, council movement. And interestingly, in her description, it was a history that very much resonates with what I’ve been up to recently on this Substack:

More recently, historians have pointed to the rather obvious similarities between the councils and the medieval townships, the Swiss cantons, the English seventeenth-century ‘agitators’—or rather ‘adjustators’, as they were originally called— and the General Council of Cromwell’s army, but the point of the matter is that none of them, with the possible exception of the medieval town, had ever the slightest influence on the minds of the people who in the course of a revolution spontaneously organized themselves in councils.

Again, this matter of spontaneity is one to which we will shortly have to return, below. I’ll just add, parenthetically, that there were a few histories which did inform and embolden Arendt’s distinctive reading of revolutionary modernism. A key case in point was Oskar Anweiler's book, The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Councils 1905-1921, which Arendt cited prodigiously.⁵ This book though only appeared in English translation at – what with hindsight we can describe as – the twilight of Arendt’s life, in 1974 (originally published in 1958). She died the very next year, in 1975. I can't help wondering if her life long argument to redeem these pluralist shoots within the revolutions of monist sovereignty, might not have achieved some greater momentum if the translation had been published earlier.

As valuable and analytically powerful as I find Arendt’s framing of this interminable pluralism at the heart of revolutionary modernism’s relentless sovereign monism, there are a few aspects of her analysis that I have found in the past, and continue to find, questionable. Though, at the same time, today I might be inclined to soften some of those past criticisms. Again, I cite a few passages to use as jumping off points for my commentary.

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...while the part played by the professional revolutionist in the outbreak of revolution has usually been insignificant to the point of non-existence, his influence upon the actual course a revolution will take has proved to be very great. And since he spent his apprenticeship in the school of past revolutions, he will invariably exert this influence not in favour of the new and the unexpected, but in favour of some action which remains in accordance with the past. Since it is his very task to assure the continuity of revolution, he will be inclined to argue in terms of historical precedents, and the conscious and pernicious imitation of past events, which we mentioned earlier, lies, partially at least, in the very nature of his profession.

…

I think we see here one of a few problems with Arendt’s analysis. From my perspective this assertion by her is a misguided product of her failure to consider the relevance of class analysis. And, again, I’ve recently made available to all subscribers here an audio recording breaking down what I believe is the biological roots of Marxian class theory – even though Marx never understood that the real infrastructural base was not economics but biology. Having said that, I don’t want to entirely dismiss her claim in the above passage. It seems to me perfectly plausible that revolutionaries, being in the business of studying revolutions, are going to imagine that their revolution has to follow some template set by history. Like the old Generals always fighting the last war. How is it, though – considering her observation that modern revolutions (even back to the English Revolution) have always had these pluralist strains – that the professional revolutionary somehow only seems to see or values the monist strains of the revolutionary tradition?

Doesn’t that seem strange? But, of course, the answer to that question is “no.” It’s not strange, because we perfectly understand that such people viewed revolutionary history through the self-serving lens of their own class interests. Pluralism doesn’t provide the opportunities for expansive bureaucratic paternalism and social engineering, which are the hallmarks of managerial class rule. Of course the virtue they’d see in the history of revolution, through the lens of their own bias, is the opportunity to optimize monist sovereignty. So, while I wouldn’t deny there may be some truth in her claim, it does have the unfortunate effect of whitewashing the phenotypic interests of the managerial class.

This is an understandable lacuna on the part of Arendt, given her rejection of Marxian economism – and so Marx’s idea of class since it was based in that economism. And while the former is a rejection with which I've sympathy, it’s analytically counterproductive to throw out the critical baby with the conceptual bath water. It is her doing so that makes it hard to explain why the professional revolutionary only takes lessons of monism from studying modern revolutions.

The next reservation I want to offer regarding Arendt’s analysis is captured in this passage:

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Both Jefferson’s plan [of the ward system] and the French sociétés révolutionaires anticipated with an utmost weird precision those councils, soviets and Räte, which were to make their appearance in every genuine revolution throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each time they appeared, they sprang up as the spontaneous organs of the people, not only outside of all revolutionary parties but entirely unexpected by them and their leaders.

This appeal to the council phenomenon as spontaneous order is a matter that has arisen repeatedly in the text above. Way back in the stone age, of 1991, I published an article in the journal Dialectical Anthropology taking Arendt to task on her sweeping assertion that the revolutionary councils were a brute force of sui genesis, inexplicably arising anew from the dust of history to assert themselves in each revolutionary context.⁶ I recently reread that article. It’s always weird to read something you wrote over three decades ago. A bit to my surprise, I found it stood up pretty well. I might soften to some degree the line of criticism I took there, but then on the other hand, with my learning (and hopefully increased wisdom) accrued over those decades, I would now introduce another line of criticism that wouldn’t have likely entered my mind in the 90s.

My 1991 article argued that in her determination to portray the council phenomenon as an eruption of revolutionary spontaneous order she was in fact turning a blind eye to a long tradition of revolutionary theorists who had precisely promoted decentralized, federalist, and localist alternatives to the crushing power of what today I’d describe as centralized, monist sovereignty – be that in the form of the state or the party. I go through a list of high profile and influential thinkers relevant in this regard: e.g., Proudhon, Kropotkin, Karl Korsch, Anton Pannekoek, Paul Mattick, and, to a more limited extent, later stars of “Western Marxism” Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci. These are just some of the highlights among thinkers who helped flesh out this rich historical legacy.⁷

Plus, her insistence upon radical spontaneity turns an oddly blind eye to the mere fact of biographic experience. As observed above, she admiringly nods to the Hungarian uprising of 1956, but also acknowledges the short-lived (133 days) Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 – during which yet again the pluralist councils were defeated by the monist revolutionary party. It doesn’t seem to occur to her though that any enthusiastic and impressionable 18 year old participant in or supporter of the brief Hungarian Soviet Republic would have been only 55 years old at the time of the 1956 uprising, with all that personal memory, experience, and inspiration to draw upon. So, clearly, she gets carried away with her appeal to radical spontaneity: a product I suspect of her wanting to conceptually insulate the councils from the taint of theory.

Still, having said all that, I do concede that many historians of the council movement provide some grounds for her insistence – even if she is prone to overestimate the firmness of that ground. Certainly, in the case of the Russian soviets, both in 1905 and 1917, Anweiler observes that despite the parallel rise in Russia of both industrial production and the increasing popularity among Russian intellectuals of Marxist theory, it appears that the formation of the soviets (the Russian word for councils) was motivated by practical concerns of workers under the harsh working conditions of the time, with virtually no regard at all to Marxist theory.⁸

Indeed, in reading Aneweiler’s account of the early 20^th century Russian conditions among industrial workers I was reminded of the strikingly similar circumstances which occasioned the efforts of Polish workers in the second half of that century. In that case, too, as we saw, the industrial workers followed their own instincts and work-action lessons from experience, and disregarded the (as history would suggest) misguided theoretical wisdom that the dissident Warsaw (managerial class) intellectuals tried to urge on them.

So, as mentioned, I have softened a little my critical regard of Arendt in this regard. Only softened, though, not reversed. At the same time, a criticism of this appeal to radical spontaneity which wouldn’t have entered my mind back in the early 90s does seem more obvious today. And this of course would be that she may well be overlooking a deep running traditionalism or conservatism, let’s say temporalism, that animated these pluralist roots within the long series of modernity’s revolutionary moments.

Whatever claims to overthrowing the l’ancien regime may be attributed to such councils amid those revolutionary moments, it may well be that the political forms they took reflected an ambivalence about the social ideals they expressed. Breaking up with pluralism may be harder to do than spatialist historians would have us think. In any event, this observation transitions us into my final criticism of Arendt’s analysis of the councils: her framing them as self-consciously revolutionary.

It is true that wherever the revolution was not defeated and not followed by some sort of restoration the one-party dictatorship, that is, the model of the professional revolutionary, eventually prevailed, but it prevailed only after a violent struggle with the organs and institutions of the revolution itself. The councils, moreover, were always organs of order as much as organs of action, and it was indeed their aspiration to lay down the new order that brought them into conflict with the groups of professional revolutionaries, who wished to degrade them to mere executive organs of revolutionary activity. It is true enough that the members of the councils were not content to discuss and ‘enlighten themselves’ about measures that were taken by parties or assemblies; they consciously and explicitly desired the direct participation of every citizen in the public affairs of the country, and as long as they lasted, there is no doubt that ‘every individual found his own sphere of action and could behold, as it were, with his own eyes his own contribution to the events of the day’.

This might be my most complicated and perhaps controversial area of criticism of Arendt. Her model, as this last passage indicates, points to the monist strain of the revolution as an effort to preserve l’ancien regime, against the modernist revolutionary aspirations of the councils. Now, I’m not going to dispute that very often the councils did see themselves as the legitimate organ of the revolution. However, even at that, this doesn’t imply – as Arendt too often seems to assume – that they therefore saw themselves as harbingers of French Enlightenment rationalism and universalism – as did the Jacobins and Bolsheviks. Indeed, to reiterate the point from above, as some of the historians she positively cites acknowledge, the workers who formed such councils were far less inspired by flowery intellectual theories and rhetoric than they were by needing to find solutions to the often brutal conditions they experienced under the thumb of early industrialization.

The confusion here, it seems to me, arises from Arendt’s assumption of the l’ancien regime as itself a beacon of monist sovereignty. However, as I demonstrated at considerable length in the series on legal pluralism, this is a myth (however widely perpetuated) which makes an ahistorical caricature of the actual medieval constitution. Among the points I made, especially in the early installments to that series, is that when you dig down into the practicality of things, even absolutism was largely a myth. If the evidence and arguments I provided in those posts stand up to scrutiny, than (as Marx said about Hegel) we find Arendt standing on her head, and need to turn her right side up.

What was happening in this relentless battle between monism and pluralism within revolutionary modernism, is not the pluralist councils attempting to overthrow an ancient legacy of monist sovereignty, but rather the monist parties and states attempting to complete the imposition (started by many latter monarchs) of such a sovereignty against the ancient legacy of the medieval constitution’s institutional and legal pluralism. The councils, rather than instruments of modern revolution, should be better understood as interminably resistant, ever resilient, relentlessly emergent shoots of heterarchical pluralism.

So powerful remains this pluralist tendency and its tradition that even those who might well be thought of as modernist revolutionaries found themselves turning to it for their inspiration and models of self-organization. Indeed, it’s a very good question as to what exactly the contemporary would might look like today if revolutionary modernism had been realized through such institutions of heterarchical pluralism, rather than the monist ones which did in fact eventually triumph. And, as alluded to above, an important factor in the actual historical outcomes that come down to us as the modernist legacy has been the impact of the contemporary managerial class.

I’ll conclude these remarks on Arendt’s contribution to the history of revolutionary pluralism with some specific observations on that class, and aspects of its political strategies which I’ve raised in previous work.⁹ I’ve frequently emphasized, on this Substack and in my books (The Managerial Class on Trial and A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars) the phenotypic characteristic of managerial class ventriloquism. Arendt’s analysis, in her very distinguishing and counterposing of the pluralist and monist strains of revolutionary modernism, provides an occasion to observe this dynamic at work in the spatialist conquest of pluralism. This passage from her book invites just such an analysis:

What struck [Marx and Lenin] was not only the fact that they themselves were entirely unprepared for these events [i.e., the Paris Commune of 1871 and the first Russian Revolution of 1905, respectively], but also that they knew they were confronted with a repetition unaccounted for by any conscious imitation or even mere remembrance of the past. To be sure, they had hardly any knowledge of Jefferson’s ward system, but they knew well enough the revolutionary role the sections of the first Parisian Commune had played in the French Revolution, except that they had never thought of them as possible germs for a new form of government but had regarded them as mere instruments to be dispensed with once the revolution came to an end. Now, however, they were confronted with popular organs—the communes, the councils, the Räte, the soviets —which clearly intended to survive the revolution. This contradicted all their theories and, even more importantly, was in flagrant conflict with those assumptions about the nature of power and violence which they shared, albeit unconsciously, with the rulers of the doomed or defunct regimes.

The extent to which the pluralist strain of such historically impactful revolutionary moments did indeed confound the rigid ideologies of such managerial class revolutionaries as Marx and Lenin is clear enough. What Arendt doesn’t sufficiently highlight in these remarks is their striking response to these challenges. There's an intriguing rhetorical/theoretical double duplicity connecting Marx to the pluralist revolt of the Russian soviets.

First, Marx, in a desperate effort to maintain his own relevance within the worker's international, made a great display of embracing the Paris Commune of 1871. Even going so far as to write the odd pamphlet, The Civil War in France, towards this end.¹⁰ This coopting gesture though required him to celebrate themes of the commune that clearly – as Bakunin among other contemporaries noted – contradicted his own prior theoretical commitments to monist sovereignty (e.g., the dictatorship of the proletariat), particularly in his newfound admiration of the Paris Commune's embrace of centrifugal federalism.¹¹

This deathbed conversion (figuratively speaking) by Marx, then provided fodder for Lenin to execute a theoretical (and eventually organizational) cooptation of the Russian soviets, much in keeping with Marx's theoretical cooptation of the Paris Commune. Lenin could lean on a text by Marx to conceptually integrate the soviets into the Marxist worldview – as preposterous as such integration may have seemed to any historian of ideas paying much real attention. The true story here was that in both cases an enthusiast of monist sovereignty, cynically trying to theoretically coopt a rebellion against centralized power, erupting from within a very different tradition, attempted to marshal that rebellion’s energies and sympathies toward a long term strategy of imposing just such a monist sovereignty. 

As I've argued repeatedly, on this Substack and in recent books (The Managerial Class on Trial and A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars), this ventriloquist cooptation is the calling card of managerial class manipulation and self-concealment. The difference of course is that in terms of immediate political effect, to say nothing of historical consequences, Lenin's ventriloquism proved vastly more effective, and so affective. But, I would claim, all of this is best understood through the lens of the spatialist victories within the phenotype wars, which were executed via the era of revolutionary modernism.

While Arendt’s framing of these historical events is not without its shortcomings, at its heart is a deeply sensitive and insightful appreciation of the resilience of heterarchical pluralism. And perhaps therein lies a modest hope that even in the throes of a spatial regime which seems doomed to crash off the civilizational cliff, the pluralist option can be trusted to remain an interminable resource for the temporalist preparation for, and cushion against, just such a collapse.

Given the often obscured etiology between the council movement on the continent and the promotion of Guild Socialism in Britain, this post will serve a nice segue into the our discussion of guilds, old and new, soon to hit these always red hot pages. So, if you don’t want to miss that, and haven’t yet, please…

And, as usual, if you know anyone else who might be interested in what we discuss here, please…

Meanwhile: Be seeing you!

1. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Classics, 2006). Incidentally, writing in 1964, Arendt entertained a complicated social and political analysis, but one that clearly anticipated more recent temporalist critiques of the spatial regime, which indicate her awareness of what I’ve identified as a recognition that free market prosperity not only is not an incontestable good, and very much a manifestation of spatialism. For instance, from the book under consideration: “Free enterprise….has been an unmixed blessing only in America, and it is a minor blessing compared with the truly political freedoms, such as freedom of speech and thought, of assembly and association, even under the best conditions. Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.” (Emphasis added)

2. What is this free-floating ellipsis about, you ask? I write this stuff in a word processing software and copy and paste over here. Sometimes, though, some weird kind of formatting sneaks in. Particularly when I’m copying and pasting quotations from PDFs into the word processor (then the whole thing into here). And then the formatting on here won’t work properly. So I sometimes have to use these weird little ellipses to break up paragraph linking which I don’t otherwise know how to separate. That’s all. It doesn’t mean anything.

3. While there’s no space to expand on the point here, a major theme in Arendt’s analysis is a strong connection between the “true republic” and localism and federalism. See her discussion of Jefferson’s never realized “ward system,” and the degree to which its logic animated the America “revolution,” which she sees through a far different lens than the disruptive revolutions of Europe – from England to Russia.

4. Those who’d like to really get into the deep weeds of Arendt’s political philosophy will discover the ways in which this observation on the historical role of the nation-state connects to her more famous analysis of its dubious role in the origins of totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, First Edition (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973).

5. Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Councils, 1905-1921 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975).

6. Mike McConkey, “On Arendt’s Vision of the European Council Phenomenon: Critique from an Historical Perspective,” Dialectical Anthropology 16, no. 1 (1991): 15–31, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00247767.

7. There is an extensive, if somewhat obscure, often difficult to find, literature on these topics. A couple places to begin would be: Paul Mattick, Anti-Bolshevik Communism, First Edition (London: Merlin Press, 1978); Serge Bricianer and Malachy Carroll, Pannekoek and the Workers’ Councils, First Edition (Saint Louis: Telos Press, 1978).

8. Anweiler, The Soviets.

9. I won’t go into it here, but Arendt did have a peculiarly neutralist attitude toward economy and technology, which in addition to coloring her view of the council movement also left her much too vulnerable to technocratic cooptation: McConkey, “On Arendt’s Vision of the European Council Phenomenon.”

10. Karl Marx, Civil War in France, trans. Tim Newcomb (Newcomb Livraria Press, 2023).

11. Anweiler, The Soviets.