Shortly after the attack on the World Trade Center, a decade after the fall of the USSR, it may have been delusional to present Communism as a proximate threat for the West.

Even nowadays, in the Western Right especially, lines are rather drawn between ethnicities and civilizational1 blocks, or between a West (embodied primarily by the USA) seen as having degenerated due to its liberalism, and peripheral powers we ought to be allied with such as Russia, since they incarnate a Third Position : only with them can we create the future multipolar world.

After all, we all know that the Soviet Union was a totalitarian hellhole, that millions of people were killed gruesomely in political purges and famines, worked to death in the absolutely dehumanizing gulag. Leading thinkers told us that Communism has proven to be a Grand Failure2 both in theory and practice, and even communists are disillusioned, especially about stalinism. The Black Book of Communism, in 1997, gave us many more elements to be assured of that. We now live in another world, maybe in the End of History, maybe not, but one thing is sure: peoples are now vaccinated against it due to its horrors, therefore Communism cannot come back, and only neurotics can delude themselves with the contrary. Of course, these views could nowadays be nuanced a bit, but they still remain popular.

Saying that Communism represents an actual and real threat is not seen as very pertinent3, and was even far less in 2002 (a date that has to be kept in mind to avoid anachronistic judgements), when a substantial and quite edifying study on The Future of Communism was written by fascist and Catholic philosopher Joseph Mérel4.

Behind a “dull and uselessly austere title”5, one can find a very original and sharply reasoned attempt at defining the essence of Communism, and incredibly penetrating developments on topics such as the comparated psychology of liberals and communists, the reason behind mutations from one to another, the structure of desire, the logics of liberal globalism, order and justice, love and sin, et caetera. Not only this: trying to tackle purely philosophical and metaphysical issues, the author presents, in 2002, potential geopolitical scenarios and helps one see how modern problems such as CRT or “wokism” share the exact same roots, with an undeniable foresight6. This makes it an extremely enlightening tool for understanding not only the communist phenomenon but also current issues in Western politics, and being able to avoid poor tactical and strategical choices, hence (not to mention its unavailability) why I chose to outline its most essential (sometimes technical) elements in this article7.

L’avenir du communisme

Starting from an examination of the European (focusing on France) nationalist discourse on geopolitical alliances in the late-90s to early-2000s, Mérel sees several great tendencies appearing after the Fall of the Soviet Union. All of them consider Russia to now be a reliable and fundamental ally against either US-led globalism, islamism, or a judaized, liberal “West”. He proceeds to note that all of these positions become untenable if one considers that Communism is not yet dead and buried, could come back in Russia or elsewhere, and thus chooses to ask how could Communism have survived like a flame beneath the ashes, by trying to truly understand it, its core logic, and what really drives men to adopt it.

In order to legitimize his enterprise, he starts by giving a very concrete reason for keeping Communism in mind, which is the everlasting human desire for utopia.

Utopia in a disillusioned world

After having reminded the reader of the platonic lessons about the infinity of human desire, he briefly examinates the promises and reality of the globalist utopia. Since a global State would

“de jure coincide with the advent of the actualized realization of all virtualities of the essence of man”, it should be seen as “the promise of human welfare, the event annunciating the overcoming of all contradictions inherent to the mundane life”. However, “the real, liberal globalism, as unleashment of consumerist individualism, begins to look like hell, or at least can be said to be an immense and morose letdown”. “Sending back every person to their ego, commanding them to dedicate their life to the maximization of their material needs due to the iron law of its competitive functioning, globalist capitalism compromises every possibility for men to unite in the name of the non-financial research of a transcendent, spiritual good.”

Accordingly,

“the human desire is not only not satisfied but rather exacerbated, in so that it should have been fully actualized [by the promises of globalism]. We can deduce, a priori, that the negativity of utopia, unhinged by the extreme frustration rising from the fact that its historical advent was thought to be most imminent, acts as a silent leaven within peoples. This is the reason why we are right to ask ourselves if the marxist utopia could be likely to come back to life.”

For Mérel, not even religion in the vague sense would be able to conjure such a desire; only a self-conscious and doctrinally solid Catholicism can, for it overcomes utopia, as the only religion to properly distinguish between nature and supernature8, and consequently the only religion letting the natural resources (primarily, reason) of men be fully deployed for properly articulating the immanent, localized, historical ends, with the Revelation of a transcendent kingdom of God.

“Improper forms of religion such as Islam or Orthodox Christianity, as theocratic, do not properly distinguish between nature and supernature: a religion exclusive of its real difference forbids itself to give the rationale for the (yet required by the [human] desire for the absolute) overcoming of the temporal order; it can at best promise it as the content of its “faith”, but such a promise is vain because it is unthinkable. Willing, through the indistinction of Church and State, to eternalize the temporal only leads to temporalizing the eternal. As a matter of fact, such returns to religion can all be reduced to the virtuous forms taken by the resentment of those forsaken out of growth.”

Since globalism fails to keep its promises and since there are no solid signs of an imminent conversion of the Nations to a true Catholicism, the only utopia left is that of “the communist messianism, thought as the truth of liberalism (which is in fact how it presents itself9).” Some may send us back to the argument of the failure of Communism and of its horrors, or even to the innate aspiration of men to freedom or to religion (as homo religiosus) to counter the author’s arguments, but as he says in a later chapter of his study,

“The practical failure revealed by the application of a doctrine (endemic poverty, gulags, etc.) does not necessarily induce a pragmatic abandon of said doctrine from its defenders at all. It only does so if that failure gives birth to a revision of the subjective reasons that disposed them to embrace this doctrine.”10

And the marxist doctrine, as Joseph Mérel says, is

“the most rational theorization of Communism, its unsurpassable doctrinal justification, unsurpassable as induced by the most radical perversion of the normal course of things, namely the explicit deification of man, the absolutization of human subjectivity”,

which brings us back to the problem of the current eclipse of Communism by the victorious globalist and liberal capitalism. In order for Communism to have survived, it needs to be feeding off the same vice as liberalism, and here lies the core of the author’s lesson: what drives both doctrines is not a wish to be satiated, some sort of consumerism, or for the latter something as vague as egalitarianism. Fundamentally, both material goods11 and egalitarianism are only means to their respective ends: self-deification.

Quoting Sartre, he reminds us his lesson: what caused the apparition of marxism has not yet disappeared.

“Far from being exhausted, Marxism is still very young, almost in its infancy; it has scarcely begun to develop. It remains, therefore, the philosophy of our time. We cannot go beyond it because we have not gone beyond the circumstances which engendered it.”12

“[This quote] disposes the contemporary observer to understand that Communism, in its true, metaphysical roots, comes from subjectivism, and consummates its demands; correlatively, it make us feel the eminent actuality of the communist danger, in so that the current world is becoming increasingly subjectivist.”

Only a subordination of the economy to the political reason ordained to the common good13, a sublimation that capitalism failed to achieve (save for fascist regimes), could overcome the dangers of that temptation.

Before proceeding to elaborate on the specificities and contradictions of liberalism, and in fact as an introduction to such a development, Joseph Mérel states a working hypothesis on the Perestroika and the subsequent fall of the Soviet Union, namely that it may have been a deliberate move from Soviet authorities, inspired by a long-term, dialectics-heavy strategy of using globalization as a tool for the interests of Communism14.

Just like Lenin pragmatically restored private property in the early days of Bolshevism with his NEP, just like international Communism went through a national moment with Stalin’s Socialism in one country (not to mention the instrumentalization of both nationalist and religious movements in the Third World), this apparently contradictory moment (the disappearance of a visible anchor point) would in the end be understandable in light of these subjectivist roots of liberalism, and of its internal logics taken to its extreme consequences, willfully desired by Soviet politicians and strategists15.

Subjectivism in liberal capitalism

Trying to consider the hypothesis of the consumerist drive and the appetite for pleasures being the ends of both liberalism and marxism, and therefore of the former being the “immanent truth of socialism”, Joseph Mérel shows that liberal capitalism fails to be explained by such a drive. It

“requires virtues of hard work, abnegation, endurance that essentially contradict the [hedonistic and consumerist] ends to which this system ordains them. […] The ratio between the quantity of lowly pleasures and the quantity of effort spent to obtain them is better satisfied in a state of nature such as that described by Hobbes than in a sophisticated industrial capitalist society.”

A contractualism motivated by '“the concern for immediate, compulsive interests” itself is contradictory, for the exact same reasons.

Hence why,

“If the appetite for pleasure cannot explain capitalism, even though it only offers material goods by itself, then it is something immaterial that is aimed at, through these goods. We can think of the wish to be socially recognized, to belong to an elite, to the promethean desire to be “Masters and Possessors of Nature”; in short, we have to consider that in the pursuit of inequality (generating an exhausting spirit of competition), men are looking for the exaltation of their subjectivity, or for the pleasure of loving themselves […], to experience, through the satisfaction of their lowly desires, the sovereignty of their volition, the omnipotence of their free will, in so that the satisfaction of desires made possible by the accumulation of possessions is only wanted as a sign, manifestation, proof or confirmation of the omnipotence of the Self understood as the infinite - “divine” - negativity of the consciousness.”

But Mérel doesn’t caricaturally tries to destroy the Self and its appetites in the name of a false humility against that. Rather, he reminds the reader that all this is but an adulteration of a sane desire16. Against its marxist corruption (the class struggle), he invokes Hegel’s lessons on the dialectics of recognition, “which resolves itself in the conversion of consciousnesses - or antagonistic subjectivities - to the concrete identity of the State (…). Hegel even suggested that this dialectics ends in the affirmation of God as the ultimate term of the quest of human desire, interior intimor meo17, because He is the absolute Origin.” As Hegel says,

Self-Consciousness is, according to this its essential universality18, only real to itself in so far as it knows its reflection in others. (I know that others know me as themselves.) And as pure spiritual universality, as belonging to the family, one’s native land, etc., [it] knows itself as an essential self. This Self-Consciousness is the basis of every virtue, of love, honour, friendship, bravery, all self-sacrifice, all fame, etc.19

The author adds that

“The good that self-consciousness is for the consciousness is not a good it relates to itself, but rather a good it is related to: the knowledge, by the consciousness, of its essence as Reason is in truth the self-knowledge of the creator Essence that grounds it (since it is by thinking the beings that God makes them exist), and therefore subordinates it. Hegel reminded us that the promotion of individual freedom, the exaltation of the subjectivity, of personal initiative, is only a moment, indeed necessary but subordinated, of the effective and unwordly advent of the specifically human - speculative - welfare. In this perspective, the eminent and plebiscited value of the person, against all kinds of personalism, comes from its status of instrument of concretion of the human essence (or nature), whose personal singularity is only an individuation of, and not the raison d’être or substance20. For that reason, the good of the human consciousness comes from its abnegation, or its restitution to its essential origin, and the legitimate desire for inequality sought in conflicts is always subordinate to transcendent values in which the subjectivity is together crucified, conserved and negated.”

What does that lesson mean in the economical order ?

“Material success, which is always desired in a climate of concurrence convoking the objective merits of work and skill, ordered to spiritual goods (be they misdirected or not), can only invite the (increasingly numerous, because if all get the same thing, there no longer is any means to be distinguished from the other) losers to plebiscite a system that causes their failure if this abnegation is also demanded from winners, in so that they too have to subordinate their own success to transcendent values recognized as such by all men, regardless of their social status: the greatness of the Nation, the order of the common good, and ultimately, the glory of God.”

But as we saw, promising only material goods, it

“can only convoke subjectivities as ordered to themselves, acting for themselves; it can only mobilize them by being perceived by them as the instrument of their own satisfaction and self-glorification.”

Just as sportsmen can all benefit from their competition, be they winners or losers,

“if this failure is dedicated to the promotion of an order valuable by itself, to which everyone is rendered unto, in which all recognize themselves as the extraposition of a common nature21”,

members of a sane, organicist society could. Under the current forms of capitalism, however, only frustration can come from losing, for there is no recognized order in the neutral “nomocracy” of liberals such as Hayek; no transcendent law can politically be tolerated, even though this system tolerates anticonsumerist political and spiritual aspirations, as long as they are kept in the private domain.

Since liberal capitalism, due to its very mode of functioning, causes an indefinite multiplication of desires and their perversion, since it relegates transcendent aspirations to the private domain, Mérel asks if a fully human life can really be lived without any form of public deployment, and convokes Aristotle, who talks about the necessity, for the virtuous man, to exercise his virtues exteriorily22. He adds that

“the citizen of a liberal society is asked to either be reduced to his consumerist appetites, or to adopt an untenable, in fact schizoid psychology and behaviour.”

Quite clearly, behind its apparent neutrality, this system only further nurtures the subjectivist aspirations it is grounded in, and the failure of those who are not at the top becomes even more unbearable with abundance, for flattering the material appetites of all losers of this system through technological advance does not extenuate, but rather reinforces the egalitarian desires that, as we saw, are only instruments for the desire for self-deification. This makes such societies eminently unstable - “intrinsically contradictory, not only, as Marx wanted to convince himself of, solely due to the technical procedures it implements, but rather due to the effects of the subjectivism that invests itself in its bosom, both convoked and offended by it” -, since, subterraneanously, fertilized with resentment, the very roots of what makes marxism attractive will only grow stronger.

Subjectivism in marxism

The above, almost programmatic quote taken from Marx’s doctoral thesis, reaffirmed in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right23 : “man is the highest being for man”, could be sufficient to show the subjectivist roots of marxism, but it is not enough to understand its internal logics, and why it is “the insurpassable theorization of subjectivism”.

For Marx, consciousness will always be the Absolute (höchste Wesen), the divine. It can be defined, to him, as a social product24, as the torment of matter25, and

“here lies the reason why Engels undertook writing a Dialectics of Nature26, according to which the material nature (which is in this regard the Supreme Being as defined as thing-in-itself) produces man through an internal opposition, as the void of itself, and takes him back to her: the subjective consciousness is not ontologically first, and it is realist (non transcendental). Man is a being of Nature in so that Nature is (…) a process of humanization of herself.”

Yet, as Mérel said offhandedly in the course of the earlier part on liberalism, marxism-leninism works dialectically between two poles:

“Consciousness is just as much ontologically first, according to a reversibility borrowed from the Hegelian Logics of the Essence (which, for Hegel, is only a moment of the logical process, which is only systematic as Concept - the spiritual Concept, far away from Marx… - intronized as Subject of the essential position of the being that is its being): Nature, giving ground to the consciousness by collapsing into it in order to come from it, is only existing (être) through the consciousness that lays her down.”

Drawing from the Theses On Feuerbach, quoting marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre (“Nature itself exists for us only as a content, in experience and human practice”27) , he then elaborates on the Feuerbachian heritage28 in marxism: “Consciousness is alone the actual (wirkliche) being.”29

“Feuerbach’s thesis identifying the (divine) spirit to human consciousness is not Hegelian: if Nature for us only exists in and through the human consciousness, then this is a return to the kanto-fichtean primacy of practical reason30. It could seem absurd for materialist monism to have an affinity with transcendental dualism, but in fact there is nothing less unpredictable: Homo homini deus est; Feuerbach does not reject religion, the inclination to worship, he repudiates the separation of God and man, he makes man worship himself. The irrefragable tendency of man to worship himself a long time ago made him objectify himself in a God he made the mistake of laying down as separate from him, while making this objectivation of himself something he was himself an objectivation of (which is a necessary effect of all religiosity); in fact (according to Feuerbach’s “truth”), man objectivates himself in what he is objectivied by, therefore establishing himself as divine and self-caused. If one adds that for Feuerbach, matter is the absolute (…), we get the following thing: matter objectivates itself in man because he objectivates it and objectivates himself in it, according to a reciprocal causality supposed to be insuppressible; which makes materialist monism the reverse side of an absolute subjectivism. […]

In other words, the objective being of matter, as independant of the human praxis, is for Marx a thing-in-itself in the kantian sense, or rather, the noumenal thing-isation (chosification) of an abstraction. In this respect, it is not Nature that is ontologically first, but Action, of which praxis is the self-consciousness of, Nature and consciousness turning out to be the objective and subjective poles of a single reality, both potentially considerable as first in so that one is correlative to the other.”

What does men adopting such a doctrine lead to ?

“Let’s take a man, lurking into a ferocious individualism, refusing to be accountable to God, to men, to Tradition, to the Nation, to any sort of alienating form of authority - be it the devil himself - that would induce the representation of an order. If he wants to be his own, self-sufficient master, he has to strip himself of the human nature that is supposed to be his paradigmatic essence, immanent and/or transcendant, since it would force him to be only what he is. Being a pure consciousness, without figure and nature, pure subjectivity, pure freedom excluding any determination that would limit him, he is nothing but pure power - better : pure activity - “to make; not to become, but to make, and in making to make [one]self”, according to the word of Lequier31 picked up by Sartre. His residual being will be the result of his making: humanizing Nature by negating it through work, he gets in a determinate relationship with it, posing himself by being opposed to it, gets naturalized and gives himself his own nature.

Moreover, if there is no human nature in the aristotelian sense of a formal, ontological and universal principle, immanent to the person and individuated by the particularity of the body whose nature as a form is the act of, then the human race is nothing but a nominalistic “ens rationis”, a word, to say a collection of individuals that may seem to resemble eachother. [In this case, t]o realize one’s human condition being the wish of all terrestrial subjectivity excludes adequacy with one’s essence, because it does not exist. To realize one’s human condition will require that one identifies himself with the totalizing collectivity of individuals having in common to not have anything in common in the order of the individuality, save for that non-being that is the laborious activity: deprived of a nature, the individual shares nothing with the other, and the maximisation of his difference, which makes him de jure indifferent to the other, makes him in-different, if we may, non different from him, identical to the other with whom he fusions in the order of the shared non-being that is their whole being. That is why the praxis, the activity of which self-appearance is the consciousness of (this same consciousness whose whole being consists of not being what it negates, and to be it through negating) objectivates itself through work, gives itself both in and through work a positive or objectal existence, but in a collective manner: the praxis is the concrete reappropriation of the abstract human race, celebrated in the bourgeois illusion of the “Rights of Man”, by the acting man. Work being collective, the residual nature, the objectivity that the human consciousness gives to itself will also be: therefore, the human essence is the whole of social relationships, that can be manipulated by all those who make it be and are included in them. As a result, in the revolutionary - and it will always be so since its being is to negate, just as Goethe’s Mephisto - praxis that gives birth to the generic or social man, the massification, destructive of all authentic human personality, reveals itself to be the result of an unhinged subjectivism that supports its crushing yoke both because it is impersonal and induced by the absolutization of freedom itself. As impersonal, the impression of submission, offending the self-sufficient subjectivity, disappears; as the product of the deified consciousness, the servitude of the collective being suffered by the Self that fusions with it becomes a loveable monster to a consciousness that recognize in it the expression of its sovereignty. […] Far from being a classical tyranny, it is a tyranny of all, exercized on all, and the Red Tsars are but the scum of the pleb (l’écume de la plèbe).”

Globalization

We saw that the author considered the hypothesis that the Perestroika may have been deliberate. The results of the above, quite technical lessons on the bipolarity of marxism are invoked to go back to this claim and try elaborating on it, and also on the other apparent self-contradictions mentioned (NEP, Socialism in one country). After all, if marxists consider capitalism to generate the contradictions by which it will perish, one could ask why they didn’t let it develop instead of trying to gain ground in the Soviet states. And if such a ground truly was needed, the apparent suicide of the USSR following the Perestroika does not make sense at all.

Mérel however recalled that the first marxists, who wanted to be “orthodox”, considered direct action as anti-scientific and too hasty, akin to anarchism and thus undesirable: the internal contradictions of capitalism and the objective economic determinisms were sufficient to provoke the advent of socialism in the end.

As opposed to that view, more lucid marxists such as Lenin underlined the necessity to pay attention to the subjective conditions of historical ruptures. The first weren’t completely wrong, but could not understand that it was not the consumerist frenesy per se, not economical rules, not capitalism (in the marxist sense) as a simple technique for organizing the economy that could lead to such an advent if it wasn’t for the subjectivist drive:

“Capitalism does not fall like a ripe fruit. The subjectivist origins (in their hedonistic form) that stirred it up need to be awakened from its very bosom (taking the form of the egalitarian drive) in order for the virtualities of its self-surpassing to be actualized, and for the socialist promises that it contains against its will to be released. In order to become the contrary that will solve it, capitalism needs, in particular, underproduction crises following overproduction crises, moments of shortage that will wake the frustration of the consciousness up from its hedonistic dream, and will exceed it to the point of being ready for the advent of a collectivist totalitarianism that will consummate its demand for self-deification.”

This is why, throughout the whole 20th Century, the Communist bloc, after having gained a strategic material seat in Russia, did not prevent globalization but rather favored it, for example through its political and cultural action: paralizing unions can only favor the delocalization of industries and investments abroad, but also mass migration since foreign workers will be interesting both (for capitalists) as cheaper labour and (for communists) as potentially revolutionary due to the loss of a sense of identity, which will also happen within the native proletariat.

The leninist revolution,

“while pushing the liberal conditions of the advent of communism, prevented, through the mediation of local communist parties, all attempts of arrangements between the capitalist praxis and the national exigencies; it was about not letting capitalism - understood as (or rather reduced to) a simple technique for organizing the production - self-limit itself by becoming subordinated to a political cause, but rather encouraging it to stay liberal through the subjection of politics to the economy and not forget about the subjectivist drive that initiated it since the 16th Century.32”

In the same manner, Communism kept promoting the national causes in the Third World (in a subjectivist way, as we’ll later see), leading to the development of anciently backwards countries and to further global interdependence.

“Now globalized and consequently closed, the capitalist system prevents the accumulation of capital, induced by a tendential suppression of the competition, to find its necessary outlets in colonialism. It destroys the speed in the circulation of capital that used to conjure its own, lethal contradictions. As globalized, it is now such as the “law of uneven development” is no longer its first law of functioning, leading to the obsolescence of the bolchevik phase of the Socialism in one country. This phase is even contrary to the globalization of the economy and to the homogeneization of peoples. So it seems logical, in a marxist framework, for it to suppress the exclusively national moment of its extension when the capitalist conditions for the advent of communism are realized nearly everywhere in the world, i. e. after having compromized every possibility for capitalism to accept the spiritual demands of national destinies (which would lead to its self-negation). […] It would seem that capitalism is now challenged to go all the way through itself, thanks to the collapsus of the Soviet Union, and to prove the determinist analysis of the first, “orthodox” marxists to be right.”

Coming back to his philosophical analysis, Joseph Mérel remarks that marxism wills to be the overcoming of philosophy. Fundamentally critical, reflexive and self-critical, it nonetheless needs to be fundamentally dogmatic; taking consciousness of itself as praxis, grounded in opposition, it keeps the truth of what it wants to bury (the systematic character of philosophizing reason). We seem to be back at the fundamentally contradictory aspect of marxism.

“With its secretly subjectivist inspiration, marxism can refer to a heraclitean ontology, identifying being with becoming (more precisely with Action) in order to emancipate the consciousness from an intemporal universe of intangible essences that would measure, thus alienate its independance, identified with the almightiness of its refusal to any given determination. But identifying the being with the acting (l’agir) means defining it as a unity of objectivity and subjectivity (the acting giving itself a direction through the teleological reflexion of the Self), of Nature and consciousness, grounded in the concept of a Matter inhabited by the nihilating anguish or the contradiction of an infinite dialectical movement.

If we favour the subjective pole of this unity, marxism turns out to be a transcendental philosophy (in the kantian sense), but a voluntarist one: nature is only for and by the consciousness and, as transcendental, the doctrine is unsatisfying in view of its own, demiurgic project. It is unsatisfying in so that it admits its idealism (which Marx admitted in the first Thesis on Feuerbach, saying that the creative side of man was developed by idealism). Being idealist, it confesses the impotence of consciousness to master reality (le réel) as it is in itself: it cannot objectivate itself or self-generate by truly negating reality, because it is escaping it; therefore consciousness is not infinite and does not coincide with the “highest divinity”. […] On the other hand, as voluntarist, marxism gives itself the means to not wait for the reality to consent to the previsional chimaeras of the theory. […]

If we favour the objective pole of this unity, we obtain a materialist and realist (non transcendental) philosophy, but a determinist one […] that excludes the causality of the free will and relegates freedom to the rank of the bourgeois values and illusions, and, asking the consciousness to submit to the iron law of history, extenuates its self-sufficiency in the act of instoring it.”

Mérel concludes:

“It is not surprising that these two poles of marxism are in a dialectical relationship, that they beget one another in their opposition without ever being able to be sublimated in a satisfying synthesis. They are actually grounded in the impossible desire for an identity of being with consciousness, of the object and the subject in the order of the becoming: only God is His Knowledge as Being, precisely because, as exclusive of all potency waiting for its actuation (His Essence is His operation), He is Pure Act, out of all becoming. Which is why, in order to hide its unthinkability, and to tell the truth, its absurdity, such a doctrine needed to obscure the causality of the terrorist raving of subjectivism without eclipsing it: the genius of leninism, in an act of perfect bad faith, was to promote a voluntarism inside of a materialist and determinist dialectics of Nature. In order to do that, he gave a driving role to the ideological superstructure (as opposed to the “pure” marxists attached to the orthodoxy) without refusing the primacy of its efficiency to the (economical) infrastructure: the adjustment of the infrastructure (lagging behind the West) to the superstructure was, ad intra (within the socialist motherland), the result of Lenin’s work, sustained by Stalin’s; but according to the very principles of leninism, the ad extra adjustment of the global capitalist infrastructure to the leninist superstructure may have been the phase (a marxist abandon of the national form of its rooting, be it voluntary or involuntary, in order to precipitate the capitalist rampage in which capitalism will blow up, due to the inflammation of its contradictions) that was followed. […] If Putinian nationalism fails to produce the desired effects of its promoters (reconstitution of a Russian, national-capitalist Empire), the marxist spirit could bloom again, against all odds.”

Examinating the current discourse of Putin’s Russia, 22 years after this text was written, certainly proves to be interesting.33

Passion, desire and amour-propre

“According to Pascal’s lesson, it is by distracting his desire for God in order to report it towards himself that the subjectivism of man under sin (l’homme pécheur) induces passion. As opposed to the concepts, that are always universal, passion is always particular, thus finds itself to be proportionate to the ineffability of the Self (le Moi) willing to be unique and to be the Unique - in a way similar to the nominalist delirium of a Max Stirner -, as a will to be divine. Passion, moreover, obscure yet violent (it obliterates, as it is sensible, the self-consciousness), gives to the obscured Self the illusion of depth: it is characteristic of the occult to mimick the mystery; the powerful and tenebrous moist stench of the Self’s entrails offers to the Self desiring to indulge in itself the deceptive image of the arcanum of the divine Tenebra. Passion, again, as it obliterates the reflection, gives to the Self the ability to lie to itself, to hide its miseries and its flaws, that prevent it to love itself to the measure of the infinite love it pretends to devote to itself. Passion, yet again, as intuitive, gives to the Self the ersatz of a spiritual intuition of the Absolute: indifferenciated, it grants it, which can only be a self-consciousness as a consciousness of something, the impression to recognize itself through the unlimitation of the feeling (l’illimité du sentiment) in which it dissolves itself. As such, the divinized feeling - which is at the core of romanticism - is venomously pleasureable in so that it enables the Self to materialize its subjectivism. In passion, the whole of the will manifests itself, as intentionally alienated, spousely (sponsalement) deprived of itself, or of the sovereignty over its act […]. The Self alienates itself in passion only to reflectively identify to itself in and through it, and in doing so to experience itself as self-sufficient or aseic (aséique): if this wasn’t the case, passion would be innocent, dissociated from the will that in fact inspires it by filling itself with its commotions; passion would exclude to ever be the sinful matter of a free will desiring itself. The void of the pure Self coming back on itself reports it on the passion that tendentially eclipses it, but this contradiction precisely exempts it from crucifying itself by reporting to God the love that it has for itself. In order to grasp itself and to revel in itself, the Self needs to have an object determinating it, yet as it aims at itself in the indetermination of the pure freedom it is reduced to, it needs to have an indeterminate object: such an object is passion.”

Through this process, the sane love for himself becomes corrupted into the pascalian amour-propre; through a passionate love for creatures, it is the Self that is adored: it intoxicates itself; the will wills itselfs, completely liberated from all rules and norms, consents to all disorders, and surrenders itself to an unchained animal life as a means to self-celebrate.

This diversion of desire from its source and ultimate goal, redirected towards the Self, can take many forms and is not limited to the lowly kind of earthly pleasures. In fact, as Mérel shows, marxism has historically shown its ability to instrumentalize nationalism and even religion, leading him to question the substantiality of the nationalist and religious revivals in early 2000’s Russia (and this can obviously apply not only to Russia).

“An accomplished subjectivism, by definition, paradoxically but not contradictorily, satisfies that desire for a transcendence in which the Self forgets itself, but only to make it serve the exaltation of the Self, experienced on the mode of a transcendental fiction implicitly recognized as such. It is therefore non-contradictory for the communist and atheist pathology to be able to salvage the affective effusions linked to the incense, liturgical vestments and chants of the most formally traditional religious services, in order to entertain, on an allegorical level, the flow of images feeding his passionate fervor. It seems contradictory to be both nationalist and internationalist, and yet it is through nationalism (that of Russians, and then of the colonized peoples of the Third World) that the marxist Internationale was effectively mediatized, which is not surprising if we remember that the secret motive driving collectivism is subjectivism, which is perfectly able to inspire a certain form of nationalism, reconciling henceforth one by another two extremes that can never cease to be logically opposed: having freed itself from the ferula of a limiting and finalizing human nature, the aspirant to self-deification finds himself to be empty (unlimited as indefinite), incapable of taking pleasure in himself, leading him to look for a substitute nature (the national identity, collective soul, nominalist radicalization of the cult of the ineffable) to which he will devote himself to in order to cherish himself, a thing possible to the extent of keeping, at the bottom of his serving and abnegative posture, a consciousness that the object of his worship (the nation) only exists through him.”

Mérel gives the counter-example of Maurice Barrès34 in so that he managed to take this path in the opposite way: starting from egotism, he matured all through his life to become a nationalist, recognizing in the Nation not a product of his Self but rather the foundation of his singularity, and leaned towards religion.
In fact,

“The conversion from the cult of the Self to the cult of the raison d’être of the Self requires to see patriotism as a moment (and not a term) of the true religious devotion adressed to God alone: there can be no sane and sustainable nationalism that is not subsumed by the religious cult, essentially non-political, excluding all remaining potential atheistic speck; a sane nationalism, not divided against itself, is necessarily critical and selective towards its heritage”,

hence why, as long as nations seem to nourish a complacent love for the mirages of liberalism or the past grandeurs of sovietism, we can only question the value of the supposed signs of their liberation, such as ostentatious religiosity and patriotism.

In order to test the rational substance of such reasonings, he draws elements from Aristotle and elaborates from them:

Since the final cause is both “(a) some being for whose good an action is done, and (b) something at which the action aims” (Metaphysics, XII, 7), “(a) the end to achieve which, or (b) the being in whose interest, the act is done” (De Anima, II, 4), then the desire aims at both its object (its aim) and its immanent actuation (to rest in the possession of the object). There is an objective and subjective manner of considering the final cause. Also, the delectation is not the proper object of desire, pleasure supervening to the act “as the bloom of youth does on those in the flower of their age.” (Nich. Ethics, X, 4) Beatitude (act of the intellect) is not delectation (act of the will). We know that the intellect having acquired knowledge can think itself (De Anima, III, 4), and in so doing imitates the absolutely concrete identity of being and knowledge of the divine, of which it is a created participation. This human self-knowledge tends to make man adequate to the essence to which he surrenders; and in so doing this essence, in a way, knows itself through him. Since the will is a rational appetite (Aquinas, ST, Ia IIae, q. 6 art. 2 ad 1), then “the will is a will to will, to will itself in its object”.

“But there are two ways of willing oneself, just as there are two ways of knowing. On the one hand, the Self can aim at the ends, can be made the instrument (as it rests in its ends) of the self-willing of its innermost essence; in this perspective, the Self espouses the divine project, conforms itself to the divine, creator Idea, which the creatural essence of the Self is a participated similitude of; the desire to rest in the ends is only a moment of the desire for that ends, ie of the will-of-self (vouloir de soi) of the ends as innermost.
On the other hand, the Self can aim, as a final ends, at the act of resting into its ends, it can make itself the final ends of the will-of-self of its inner essence. In this case, the Self does not aim at this act, at the supremely good Object who exercises its beatitude for itself, because it only desires its beatitude in so that it can report it to itself: by desiring not the locus (le lieu) but the act of resting in it, by desiring that locus only to rest in it, it aims at the delectation resulting from that act, and at the beatitude only in so that it generates that delectation. Otherwise, it would desire the locus itself, for itself, and would desire to rest in it only due to the fact that it is its wish (voeu) to communicate its act to the moved; it is against nature and thus sinful, for the delectation is but the reactive effect of the appetite’s rest in its ends, meaning that the delectation can never reasonably be a [final] ends. The Self cannot will itself at the expense of the glory of God (which is indeed, “materialiter”, the beatitude of the Self) without substituting its true beatitude (the quest for the ends) with the delectation supposed to come from it.”

Mérel then proceeds, in other very technical pages, to establish that desire regenerates itself in its Source by ordinating itself to its true ends; that it is reflexive, in so that desire itself is likeable for itself: “against Nygren, against Fénélon’s “pure love”, against Saint Bernard and his unilaterally extatic love, we [have to affirm that we] cannot oppose Eros and Agape as if they were incompatible, and we cannot pose an unsurpassable antinomy between concupiscent love and benevolent love”35. The love for the Self (and for creatures, generally speaking) are moments of the love for God, of the divine creator Will operating within him (as its created essence, willing itself, in a way, from within, therefore willing what God wants for the subject) and have to be exercised as such. Also,

“If we only consider the natural order of the creature, we cannot talk of a natural friendly love for God, since friendship demands a certain equality, which can only be aquired by Grace. We can talk of a concupiscent36 love, as a concupiscent self-love of the essence (of the Self), and not of the Self as Self. When the Self embraces this desire-for-itself of its essence, coming from within, to the point of the potentially sacrificial exigency of the abandon of the interests of the Self as Self, we can no longer talk of concupiscience in the trivial sense: we must say that such a love’s natural terminus ad quem coincides with the terminus a quo of the supernatural love freely inspired by Grace.”

One consequence of all the above points is that by refusing to be ordered by its true ends, desire limits itself by being reported towards the Self. The Self’s desire, as reflexive, does not reach its source, tears itself out from its circularity and becomes but crispation. All this defuses the desire for God, and in the end, as a desire holding itself against itself, it will only be directed towards qualitatively indigent, material goods, in order to become an unilateral desire for the Self.

A compared psychology of marxism and liberalism

All this theory may seem to have driven us away from the central issues of the potential resurgence of Communism, but the comparison Mérel does between the two - liberal or communist - main ways of being a subjectivist can only show how fruitful for understanding and concrete in its applications it can prove to be.

“It is the unhindered leap forward in his victories over matter coupled with the pleasures tied with them that feed the liberal’s self-lie. The liberal, in a way, is a man who succeeds through his self-lie to live a desire to be God taking the form of a desire for God or for the absolute, but misled into matter […] To take for an ends the indefinite refinement of the means to exist is to refuse the sursumption, and to agree with such a desire, one has to at least implicitly, but necessarily, proclaim his being to potentially be what he will become; one has to consent to the desire to be God, without accepting to live as such. If then the hedonistic progress is technically stopped, the liberal faces the following alternative: he can either abandon his thirst for the world in order to convert it into a desire for God, liberating himself from the liberal alienation; or he can abandon competition and struggle in order to become a communist, contemplating the ersatz of his divinity in the substantial interdependence of the socialist society. […] The technical failure of liberalism, if it happened, would make the liberal question [this self-lie] and his subjectivism too.

As for the communist, except for the primeval lie about the deification of the Self, he does not lie to himself. He knows he wants to be God, or at least he knows that he will not admit anything to which he could be subordinated to, which implicitly means desiring to be God. He is only tempted by liberalism inasmuch as his bodily frustrations reveal his condition of metaphysical rebel as the hell it in fact is. But he holds onto this condition more than to the carnal frenzy […].

The self-deification of the liberal is shameful, he only adheres to it laterally; in the liberal, the desire for God is covered (which is psychologically facilitated by the vague of Protestantism’s fideist dogmatics) in order to be lived in the form of a desire for things and voluptuousness, and it only appears to him when this desire for things remains hungry. In the communist, it is the conscious desire to be God (psychologically favored by the dogmatic exigency of Catholicism or Orthodoxy, of which he is a radical inversion) that demands its consecration through democratic totalitarianism.”

“The hedonistic desire is exercised by the liberal as the content of the inconscious desire to be God. It is exercised by the communist within the conscious desire to be God. It then follows that the impotency of Communism to make people happy can indeed dispose them to reject subjectivism and to save themselves, but in this case it is impossible, both logically and psychologically, that they reject it in favor of liberalism. If they rush into liberalism, as they seem to be doing in the East since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is because they aspire 1) to recover the conditions of a material profusion, required to still have something to share in an egalitarian fashion; 2) to take some rest from their insurrectional metaphysical tension by filling themselves up. […] We thus can expect them to go back to the communist egalitarianism in the more or less long run, from within the liberal system they more or less identified with, which they will make plunge with them. The radical subjectivism of the communist is only consummated from the moment the liberal temptation of the lie of a Self too faint-hearted to explicitly will its self-deification, but too subjectivist to not look into doing so in the infinite of the mundane seductions reveals to be disappointing. It was therefore suited for the communist man, to definitely slay the potential inclination towards a collapsus of his pride, for his subjectivity to be spoilt by a deep-seated habitus of hallucinatory and materialistic consumerism, and then for it to be disappointed by it, in so that it would draw from this frustration the lacking resources of revolt, making it irreversible.”

These psychological considerations would fully confirm the interpretation of the fall of the Soviet Union as logical from a marxist point of view, and observing the current world makes one wonder.

As Joseph Mérel says somewhere, the liberal wants to ape the God of Voltaire, while the communist wants to ape the Trinitarian God37.
And as the adage says, corruptio optimi pessima.