The Babuvian Conspiracy of Equals, as depicted in an uncredited French print. The conspiracy is stabbed to death before it can stab the Republic.
The government of the revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny. Is force made only to protect crime? Is it not to strike the heads of the proud that lightning is destined?
–Maximilien Robespierre, February 5th, 1794
Stalin and all his successors were vehement enemies of the petit bourgeois idea of egalitarianism. The element of Babeuf’s writing and political personality which they put to use was the very invention of the dictatorship over needs, that is to say, the idea that the subjection of the ‘rebellious’ and ‘individualistic’ private person to a ‘superior wisdom’ has to be started at the level of his needs system.
–Agnes Heller, Ferenc Feher & György Márkus,
Dictatorship over Needs, 1983
It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
—Steve Jobs, BusinessWeek, 1998
In this concluding installment of my Silicon Valley rant, I return again to the two imperatives that have guided me across this series, both taken from Evgeny Morozov in Click Here to Save Everything:
First, there is Morozov’s conviction that Silicon Valley’s hyper-capitalist technological solutionism leads us to an unacceptably reductionist view of the human condition. The oh-so marvelous solutions provided to us via the Big Data-driven Internet seek to pre-define our problems for us—so that they can then be satisfied technologically (and of course for a profit). In so doing, they are increasingly subjecting the full panoply of human needs to the law of supply and demand under conditions of advanced capitalism.
As I wrote in the last installment, through various side effects and unintended consequences, technological solutionists are replacing the informal working of the public sphere with an insidiously pale substitute—a shared platform supporting and encouraging “small republics of like-minded individuals,” held together with consumer-oriented weak ties, and resulting in a communicative liquefication of our democratic politics.
Second, there is Morozov’s insistence that Silicon Valley “corporate thought leaders” should not be given free reign to characterize the cultural significance of tech solutionism self-referentially, with recourse only to the Silicon Valley’s own techno-topian logic.
Yes. Yes, we know. It’s really a game-changer. So efficient. So transformative. So disruptive!
As I have indicated several times previously, my aim all along in this “Tedd Talk” has been to pick up Morozov’s gauntlet, and to try to offer up a specific interpretation of the technological solutionist Silicon Valley dystopia. In the spirit of Morozov’s thrown gauntlet therefore, I would now like to draw upon a certain set of resources from somewhere else entirely–from what used to be referred to as “Soviet studies”—in order to recuperate a concept that is useful for characterizing the dystopia that we see emerging from Silicon Valley’s hyper-capitalist tech solutionism.
The agenda I have in mind for this is roughly as follows: first, I want to revisit the account of radical needs that I introduced here in the third installment of this post, that ended with my fanciful reading of Tracy Chapman’s song, “Fast Car.”
By re-introducing this concept in its original context, Agnes Heller’s book The Theory of Need in Marx, my intention is to show how it leads to the interpretation of Soviet-dominated society as a “dictatorship over needs.”
Next, I consider the meaning of the Heller et al. characterization of the dictatorship over needs as an alternative to the oft cited “state capitalism” hypothesis. I explain how, as part of a necessary process of socialist self-criticism, a large measure of responsibility for the emergence of Soviet totalitarianism gets assigned to what they refer to as the “Jacobin streak” in radical socialism.
From here, I try to show that “dictatorship over needs” is an appellation that is free for re-use, not so much because Soviet-dominated society and Silicon Valley tech solutionism belong to the same “history of ideas,” but rather because they exist on a common terrain, that of what Jürgen Habermas calls the unfinished project of modernity. Despite the highly divergent contexts, my contention is that there is a strong family resemblance here. The resemblance has to do not with ideas, but with certain political decisions about “how to make our ideas come true.” It is found in the shared impulse to dictate human needs rather than work to overcome their alienation.
Agnes Heller’s The Theory of Need in Marx
The Hungarian-born philosopher Agnes Heller’s concept of the “dictatorship over needs” is first found (even if only implicitly) in her early book The Theory of Need in Marx, written in 1974, a decade before Dictatorship Over Needs: An Analysis of Soviet Societies (co-authored with Ferenc Feher and György Márkus in 1983).
One could say that there is a certain line of constraint between the two works, inasmuch as The Theory of Need in Marx announces Heller’s unorthodox, dissident Marxism, and is thus representative of the challenge of the “Budapest School” (the Hungarian New Left that was inspired by Lukács) to the Soviet system of domination in Hungary (and the rest of Eastern Europe) in the postwar period that gets expressed more fully in Dictatorship Over Needs.
Since theorizing about human needs has figured prominently in the critique of solutionism offered in this series so far, it is useful to spend just a little time sketching out some key notions from the earlier work on the way to our consideration of Dictatorship Over Needs.
Nowhere can one find in Marx the notion that “the needs of the individual, personal needs, should be subordinated to the social need, understood as the “good of the collective.”
The introduction to the English version of A Theory of Need in Marx (by Ken Coates and Stephen Bodington) starts in a very similar way to the opening of A Theory of Human Need by Len Doyal and Ian Gough (discussed in detail in the previous installment of this article). “The theory of need has been totally neglected in Keynes and all other economic orthodoxies” Coates and Bodington announce. “The mainstream of academic economics has nothing to say,” they write, “…because it is assumed that the market automatically indicates human needs.” Finally, this: “the whole of economic science becomes the study (in health and sickness) of…market mechanisms mediated by money.”
With all this in mind, it might be reasonably assumed by those of us from Western countries that the theory of need in Marx would, by contrast, stand forth as an explicit element of his critique of the capitalist “commodity market system.” And yet, as it turns out, it is not so.
The theory of need in Marx, while an essential element, is stubbornly subterranean, and has to be drawn from a number of different places across the corpus and stitched together so that it can be properly considered. It is this that Heller sets out to do in her book.
At a theoretical level, therefore, Heller seeks to challenge the orthodox account of necessity in the Marxist historical dialectic, in order to save or otherwise retain a place for the moral, “ought,” for a concept of human freedom in Marx that does not simply defer such considerations “until the self-destructive logic of capitalism leads to the establishment of the classless society.”
But there is something more to be found here than this useful labor of the academic philosopher. The center point of the work turns out to be Heller’s treatment of the equivocal concept of “social need” in Marx, and the consequences she sees that have flowed from its longstanding and even willful misunderstanding for “real socialism” the kind practiced in the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc countries until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
At a practical or political level, Heller’s aim is to call out the eastern bloc Soviet authorities (the Soviet Hungarian regime of János Kádár), which she calls “the representatives of the so-called social need” by valorizing the social consciousness of alienated or radical needs still pervasively evident among general populations under the Soviet system.
Capitalism’s tendency is generally to differentiate and refine human needs in the pursuit of market share and profit (yesterday I had to have coconut water, now its La Croix essenced seltzer).
Heller is writing here in a Marxist idiom–she does not deny that the engine of human history is found in the social, economic, and cultural contradictions that arise from the capitalist mode of production and the resulting commodity fetishism. But she nevertheless insists that this isn’t something that can just happen, as if it were according to an economic law of nature, “behind the backs” of real social and political actors, nor does she think that it is exclusively the work of the proletariat, as the revolutionary subject of this history, and as directed by a political leadership vanguard.
Heller calls the notion of capitalist contradiction, “seen as an economic law of nature,” (which is indeed discernable in Marx) his “first concept of contradiction.”
The second one (also discernable) which has to do with the manner in which capitalist alienation is generative of radical needs in the manner previously suggested, concerns the sort of social agency on the part of real actors that might lead to the overcoming of the very conditions that give rise to the alienated, radical needs in the first place.
Making this contrast sets up a confrontation with both local and central Soviet authorities over something more than a fine point of doctrine. It seeks to undermine the right of these same authorities to invoke Marx when everywhere “deciding for people,” with respect to their collective needs.
The Representatives of the ‘So-Called Social Need’
Heller’s account of “radical needs in Marx” turns on a clarification of Marx’s somewhat squishy concept of social needs, as I mentioned previously. I’m not going to sketch it again here, since we have already seen what this is all about—social needs are socially produced needs, the needs people have that can only be satisfied in and through social institutions (e.g., things like friendship and love, education, social recognition, etc.). In the course of the discussion, Heller identifies the other different senses in which Marx employs the concept of social needs.
Not found among these different senses however, Heller says, is one which identifies social need with something like “the general interest.” Nowhere can one find in Marx the notion that “the needs of the individual, personal needs, should be subordinated to the social need, understood as the “good of the collective.”
Additionally, where official thinking has gone down this road, there is the unfortunate tendency for social need, so understood, to be then decided for everyone from above–by diktat, as it were. This in turn leads to the following state of affairs: those people who have de facto needs which cannot be represented as social need, are simply told by authorities that whatever they may think, they have yet to recognize their “genuine needs.”
But here again, Heller writes, nowhere does Marx speak of unconscious, or unrecognized needs. Where we find this concept of “unrecognized needs” being employed, she adds, we likewise always also find “educators” whose job it is to make people “conscious” of their unrecognized genuine needs. But who is to decide, Heller asks, which of people’s needs is genuine?
Once again, it can only be “representatives of the so-called social need.” In other words, she continues, “the actual needs of the privileged and of the leaders of the movement…” It is they who decide which of the needs of the majority are correct, and which incorrect, she says, and the actual, existing needs of the majority are actually classifiable as false—the representatives of “social needs” then take it upon themselves to pursue the “unrecognized needs” instead of people’s real and actual needs.
The Problem of ‘Real or Existing Socialism’
Heller’s account of the theory of need in Marx, specifically her discussion of social need and radical needs, serves as the foundation for her critique, in her book Dictatorship over Needs, of how the socialist program as such gets effectively hijacked by Bolshevism (as guided by both Lenin and Stalin).
The announcement of “socialism in one country” by Stalin in 1924 presented an enduring set of problems for socialists. In what sense was the Russian peasantry a revolutionary proletariat? Was it possible to skip over stages of economic and socio-political development, given the historical dialectic described by Marx? Even more importantly, the following question: “what kind of societies are the emerging Soviet societies?”
The party’s self-image, Heller et al. write in Dictatorship Over Needs, “…was that of the executor of world-historical necessity, of the vanguard of a world revolution, of the repository of the future, of the embodiment of the real interests of the proletariat, inside and outside of Russia.”
Because the new system was not understood initially as a permanent social order at all, but as the prelude to the future world social order, it did not lay out any claim to legitimation per se. The civil war had been won, Heller et al. write, “not as the result of the generally recognized legitimation of the new regime, but as the outcome of the legitimation crisis of the preceding one.” Except for the expropriation of the previous ruling classes, all measures taken were rationalized by reference to the state of emergency. The first phase of the development of the Soviet Union can be described in political terms, they write, “as a form of Jacobin dictatorship.”
Technological solutionists (from the coneheads to the Ted Talking CEOs) have had a hard time seeing themselves, in terms of their values and motivations, as participating in the establishment of a new societal dystopia.
As M.C. Howard and J.E. King explain in “State Capitalism in the Soviet Union” (History of Economics Review, 2001) Socialist critics from the first phase of the Russian revolution (1917-1929) were first to level the charge of “state capitalism” as a description of the new society that was emerging. Since the preconditions for a proletarian revolution were missing in Russia, diverse early critics concluded that a Russian revolution would have to turn out to be a bourgeois one, overthrowing autocracy, eliminating remnants of feudalism, and actually accelerating the development of capitalism there.
Per Howard and King, Karl Kautsky thought it was inevitable that the order that would emerge would be one where the former capitalists became proletarians, and the conglomeration of proletarians and intellectuals would become the new capitalists. Also, given that workers councils remained dominated by the party, with little or no direct democracy, it was hard to see the significance of the revolution as anything but a sort of merger between the state and capitalist bureaucracies.
The basic point here, as Howard and King retell it another way (paraphrasing Raya Dunayevskaya) is that when thinking along with Marx about the class nature of society, the key thing is not so much whether the means of production are the private property of the traditional capitalist class or are state-owned, but rather whether the means of production are capital–that is, whether they are monopolized and alienated from the direct producers. Unless this actually gets addressed through revolutionary measures, as Led Zeppelin would say, “the song remains the same.”
After the rise of Stalin to unopposed power in 1929, and the subsequent establishment of a totalitarian state, the was an even stronger case for the charge of “state capitalism.” In Dictatorship Over Needs, Heller et al. remark that after the Jacobinist state of emergency had reached its effective expiration date (as all emergencies eventually must) totalitarianism was really the only alternative to what succeeded Jacobinism in the French Revolution, namely Thermidor, or from a socialist standpoint, the sellout of the revolution by an alliance of hereditary wealth, nuveau riche and the bourgeoisie.
The persistence of the Soviet Union as such across the 1930s, Howard and King write, made the proposition that it was a temporary or transitional phenomenon rather less credible—the term “state capitalism” came to designate the persistence, along with the Soviet system, “…of many of the phenomena associated with capitalism: alienation, exploitation, wage labor, inequality and the law of value.”
Needless to say, the competition with Germany and America in relation to wartime production only worked to intensify these things. After 1945 and the partition of Europe, the description of Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe as Worker States was also hard to explain, given that they were established for the most part with the aid of Red Army bayonets.
Despite all of this, in “State Capitalism in the Soviet Union,” Howard and King ultimately conclude that while there is much to be said for the state capitalism hypothesis, the problem with it is that it is “rather blunt analytically” in that it just isn’t very useful for explaining anything.
To begin with, excluding wage labor, things like alienation, exploitation and inequality are not specific to capitalism, but are also evident in pre-capitalist forms of production too.
Additionally, the state capitalist hypothesis also fails to say anything illuminating about Stalinism and its effects and after-effects. It places the emphasis on general structural characteristics, they write, “…and not on their specific Soviet forms, which differentiate the Soviet mode of production from that of the capitalist West.”
As Martin Jay writes in Marxism & Totality, paraphrasing Marx from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844: “the political economists fail to understand that behind the seemingly immutable laws of their theory lies a world of historically changing human relations, the totality of “actual life…one needs grasp the total context of meaningful relations.”
In a nutshell, the issue with the characterization of Soviet society as essentially state capitalism is that it gets at what Soviet society is not (properly socialist) but not what it is (something else, something new, something sui generis).
Soviet-Dominated Society as Dictatorship Over Needs
In Dictatorship Over Needs: An Analysis of Soviet Societies, Heller, Feher and Márkus take specific aim at this problem of “real or existing socialism.” The authors’ introduction begins with some painful admissions about what the they call their own self-delusion. “We believed ourselves, for a while to be the advocates of the regime’s genuine interests, they write, as opposed to the “…blockheads, the incorrigible sectarians, the bureaucrats, who had, because of some historical bad luck, always shaped its policies.”
“Later,” they continue, “we were no longer content to point out the contrast between the regime’s ideal type…and its historical reality…we demanded actual structural changes.” If there had been any residual misunderstanding after 1956 about whether the basis of legitimation for Soviet rule of the Eastern bloc countries was actually grounded on a socialist ideal-type, what they elsewhere refer to as a form of “substantive rationality,” the Soviet re-invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 pretty thoroughly settled the matter.
“The general findings of our analysis can be summarized as follows,” Heller et al. write: “The new society, the dictatorship over needs, is neither a novel, modified form of state capitalism, nor is it socialism—it is something else.”
The overarching name they choose to give to the emergent Soviet societies then, which is meant to foreground its specifically dystopian aspect, is the Dictatorship over Needs.
So how is this “something else” to be described? To begin with, the something else, per Heller et al. (and consistent with Howard and King as mentioned above) is announced by the outcome of the first Soviet legitimation crisis in the late 20s that established the Russian totalitarian state on the basis of what they call “charismatic legitimation” (the Stalinist cult of personality).
In this sense, they contend, we see the emergence of something new, something uniquely Russian. On the one hand, it has state capitalist structural characteristics; but on the other hand, because it insists on itself as anti-capitalist, it “…is not totally independent from socialist ideas and movements, either.”
In describing the dynamic of Dictatorship over Needs in such detail, my intention has not been to try to pluck this concept from Soviet Studies and then simply use it to suggest that Silicon Valley tech solutionism leads directly to something like the Stalinist gulag.
It has also been argued (Peter Binns, 1986) that the goal of socialism in one country all but necessitates state capitalism, because the need for the Soviet state to accelerate accumulation to affect a bourgeois revolution must be accomplished without allowing for the working of private capital. These circumstances in and of themselves, so this argument goes, is sufficient to explain the rise of a uniquely Soviet form of totalitarianism.
While all this makes good sense, Heller et al. nevertheless are at pains to insist that the question of the nature of Soviet-dominated societies cannot be resolved without the inclusion of a healthy dose of what they call “socialist self-criticism.” So, Heller et al. also consider the various candidate interpretations that arise from this quarter:
The train wreck of “real or existing socialism” cannot be explained by the “backwardness of certain countries (social and economic),” they write, “even though it has a certain affinity to backwardness.”
Nor is it due to some version of Thermidor (Trotsky’s claim of a bourgeois sellout). Nor does a Burkean interpretation help very much (chalking it up to the claim that attempts to reform social ills always results in even greater maladies).
Instead, Heller et al. zero in on the founding Leninist-Bolshevik impulse toward the declaration of a Jacobin state of emergency, the set of impulses, they believe, that explain how an Enlightenment program such as socialism should become, through what they call a kind of “cunning of unreason” the dystopian nightmare ideology of a tyrannical state.
The “Jacobin streak” in several shades of radical socialism, Heller et al. explain, harbors a secret “double anthropology” (so clearly evident with Robespierre himself) –we see a public doctrine asserting the perfectibility, even deification of man—and along with it a more private, even secret doctrine, one reflecting a desperately pessimistic view of human being, ultimately consistent the use of government terror as an appropriate means of general moral improvement.
Finally, to complete this picture, there is also what Heller et al. refer to as the “Babuvian violent homogenization of human needs.” Given the impetus of the Jacobin “double anthropology,” this is the idea that “equality can only be achieved by the total (and if necessary violent) uniformization of all human needs, and the elimination of all artificial ones.”
It is not all that surprising that Heller et al. would reach back to the French Revolution and further to question some of its utopian socialist aspects as part of their effort to come to grips with the nature of Soviet societies. For one thing, the Russian Revolution always understood itself in dialogue with its French counterpart.
The point here is that simple recourse to structural accounts alone (how the Soviet state and its satellites stood with respect to the management of the economy) can’t go very far in “explaining the gulag,” and so doesn’t tell us how a utopian project born of the Enlightenment results instead in such a widespread dystopian nightmare.
The exploration of Soviet societies as the dictatorship over needs emerges because of the need to do more than just describe, but rather also to explain.
Further, at the risk of what historians might see as an over-simplification with respect to historical causes, Heller et al. are insisting here on the need for something like a moral explanation. It is for this reason that they dare to say that all the other significant aspects of the apparatus of Soviet totalitarian state domination can be seen to flow in some sense from this basic dystopian impulse, namely that “…the subjection of the rebellious and individualistic private person to a superior wisdom has to be started at the level of his needs system.”
Don’t Turn Around, Uh Oh! Der Kommissar’s in Town, Uh Oh!
Just so we have a reasonably full sense of this “Soviet system of domination” clearly in mind: Along with terrorized personal loyalty to the charismatic leader (rather than to strictly socialist goals and principles) a major feature of this Soviet system of domination was of course the effective total sovereignty of the party in the one-party state. The principle of the people’s sovereignty, Heller et al. write, “has never been accepted, even formally, within the Soviet state.”
Following from this there is the centralization of all powers–executive, legislative, and judiciary, such that all public issues (economic-social-cultural-and political) are decided by the central authorities, who are of course also leading party members. The goal of the one-party system is the complete submission of society to the state. The one-party system, Heller et al. write, “…excludes all alternative programs in the field of politics, culture, and economy, and with it also the possibility to propose such alternatives.”
And along with this “practical liquidation of the political sphere as a whole” it also means a generalized contempt for civil society too–even contractual relations among individuals and groups can have no independence from the state.
Historicized Totality Understood as a Moral-Practical Demand
As has been said here repeatedly, Dictatorship over Needs is the name that a group of dissident Marxist-humanist socialists in Hungary in the 1980s gave to the system of Soviet domination over Eastern bloc countries in the post war era.
They sought to characterize Soviet society in this fashion, because they couldn’t remain quiescent in relation to the fiction that this system was in any real sense socialist, and they also didn’t find the description of this system as State Capitalist to be very helpful in getting to the central truth of this lived political and social experience.
Historians are necessarily cautious–they will always point to a multiplicity of causes for any given political state of affairs, and rightly so. But for people who must endure it, totalitarianism requires an explanation, and one that must be rooted, unsurprisingly, in a concept of totality.
This is especially the case where it comes to Marxist-inspired socio-political arrangements, since for Marx and thus for Marxists, history is understood as a moral-practical affair—the demand that the world of alienated bourgeois social relations ought to be overcome and replaced wholesale.
John Grumley has written that it is a hallmark of Marx’s materialism that real human needs (the aspirations of alienated subjectivities) lead to the imposition of human ends as a demand placed upon the course of history; the demand that existing institutionalized forms of social organization invested with the interests of dominant social classes should be confronted. This historicized concept of totality, as a moral-practical demand, is both real (the work of actual social classes) and indeterminate (contingent, open, non-automatic, etc.).
The characterization of Soviet-dominated society as the dictatorship over needs is thus highly warranted in relation to this set of revolutionary socialist dynamics. Soviet society did not just come about naturally, through some sort of gradual evolution. In response to the lived experience of alienated needs taken up as a moral-practical demand, a certain group of socialists seized political control in Russia.
Seeking to cope with a deepening sense of emergency, the initial Bolshevik “Jacobin dictatorship” finally settled upon a particular interpretation of what the process of “historicized totality” was going to look like. Instead of an open-ended process in which individuals collectively seek to transform their common life situation, there is instead the political realization of a will to “subject the rebellious and individualistic private person to a superior wisdom, one that starts at the level of his needs system.”
What Heller et al. refer to as the “Babuvian violent homogenization of human needs” becomes the socio-political, economic, and cultural project of the Soviet Union and its satellite states, and something approaching three hundred million people in Russia and the Eastern Bloc both confronted and negotiated this reality for more than fifty years.
The French Revolution & Modernity ‘On Endless Trial’
In describing the dynamic of Dictatorship over Needs in such detail, my intention has not been to try to pluck this concept from Soviet Studies and then simply use it to suggest that Silicon Valley tech solutionism leads directly to something like the Stalinist gulag.
Heller et al. arrive at this designation, as I have also tried to show, in and through a kind of an internal, socialist self-reflection, one that includes the manner in which those living in Russia and the east after the October Revolution of 1917 understood themselves to be in an intimate dialogue with the French Revolution. The exposure of revolutionary socialism’s “French Connection,” and the birth of modernity has been the reason for this detailed (but admittedly highly compressed) discussion of the nature of Soviet societies.
The Dictatorship over Needs, as Heller et al. are at pains to explain, has a direct line of descent that goes all the way back to Jacobinism, and even more specifically, to the final convulsion of the initial revolutionary period, the unsuccessful attempt to restore the Jacobin dictatorship in what came to be known as “The Conspiracy of Equals” under a today largely forgotten François-Noël “Gracchus” Babeuf.
Inasmuch as the Dictatorship over Needs can be characterized as a species of “the Babuvian violent homogenization of human needs” from which it has can be shown to descend, it becomes possible to talk about the applicability of this characterization to the emerging tech solutionist dystopia, and hopefully in a way that suggests the basis for a very strong “family resemblance.”
It can be difficult for the descendants of the American revolution to grasp, with any real immediacy, the sense in which the dynamics of our global political modernity (including also the complete set of economic and social dimensions, consciousness, sense of historicity and temporality) were actually cemented out of the French Revolution, and how this original set of dynamics continues to hold sway.
As I have written elsewhere, there is often struggle just to recognize the nature of the American Revolution (failing to grasp clearly its dual nature as both a war of independence, and a revolutionary struggle to establish a democratic republic).
The American Revolution, as Hannah Arendt has written, had the luxury of being a “bourgeois revolution” through and through; it was possible to take a common stand as “We the People” she writes, mostly because the economics of slavery made sure that while there were poor (white) people in the colonies, none of them were truly miserable.
In marshaling the degree of zeal and general participation needed to affect a revolution rather than a mere revolt, the movement had unleashed something else along the way, namely “Man” as the subject of universal history.
The situation was something quite different in old Europe, however, and the unfolding of the revolution reflects it. For most knowledgeable Americans, there is the storming of the Bastille, something about the Declaration of the Rights of Man, then the guillotine and Napoleon before they finally got it all sorted out and made the world safe for the French version of bourgeois liberalism.
I must confess that for most of my life, I found the events of the revolution and their aftermath to be rather hard to follow—a kaleidoscope of groups and subgroups jockeying for power, a swirling farce of Girondists, Montagnards, Hébertists, Cordeliers, Sans-Culottes, Marat dead in the bathtub, and then the Thermidoreans, all running around denouncing and informing upon one another. Throw in a flying roulette wheel and Indians dropping in by parachute, and you have the final scene in the comedic 1967 James Bond movie, Casino Royale!
As it turns out, the sense that there was a marked incompatibility between intentions and outcomes, and that the primary political meaning of the revolution (other than the break with the old regime) is hard to pin down, is largely the reigning consensus among historians. It is the consensus that there is no consensus, because we are still living in the political space created by the revolution’s “no longer and not yet,” the burden of giving our political freedom a specific and determinate content.
Eric Hobsbawm writes that while it wouldn’t necessarily be wrong to say that the revolution amounted to a class struggle, resulting in a bourgeois revolution that overthrew feudalism in order to establish a capitalist France, “these results were achieved by a process that was at odds with middle class liberalism, and in important ways, incompatible with its objectives.”
Bourgeois liberalism could not have been established against the resistance of court and nobility without mobilizing the common people, he adds, nor could France have resisted counter-revolution and foreign invasion without mobilizing forces that were neither bourgeois nor liberal. It was necessary for the men of the middle rank of society to speak for the 3rd estate, and to include them in their account of the collective struggle, even though, in the end, these strata had seriously conflicting interests.
So, what to make of the French Revolution? What was the meaning of it, as revolution?
We cannot say for sure, because it really isn’t over. In terms of our modern possibilities for political action, and the orders that follow from these decisions, modernity is an open site, an unfinished political project, one which, as Leszek Kolakowski says, remains on “endless trial.”
To entertain any theory of revolution, Hobsbawm says, is to assume a political posture—the value-free study of revolution is simply not possible. Some will look back, applauding the moderate elements that won out, thereby making France safe for the bourgeoise; and others look back and applaud the Jacobin aspect, as a precedent and model for “the revolution still to come.”
The late Ferenc Feher wrote that the French Revolution provides us with a “universal framework for political action” thereby making the French revolution the “master narrative of modernity” which, in its different elements and aspects “has served as blueprints for other nations and national imaginations.” The various moves on the gameboard, so to speak, and in their possible combinations, remain as primary points of reference:
- 14 July, 1789 (Bastille); the mob in their homespun pantaloons, has spoken. Now what?
- 1793-4; In come the middle rank men in knee breeches; State of Emergency cum Reign of Terror
- 9 Thermidor, 1794; Conservative reaction, coup by The Directory, an alliance of nouveau riche and middle-class interests
- 18 Brumaire, 1799; Napoleon Bonaparte becomes First Consul
- 1814, The Bourbon Restoration
Place your bet and spin the wheel! Anything is possible at the modern political Casino Royale!
Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of Equals
In following the golden thread that connects Soviet society to the French Revolution in Dictatorship over Needs, of particular importance is the reflection on one of the lesser known sequences, namely the so called “Conspiracy of Equals” led by François-Noël “Gracchus” Babeuf. Who has ever heard of Babeuf? Among the latter-day fans of the bourgeois revolution at any rate, not very many. For those who saw in Thermidor “the revolution betrayed,” along with Leon Trotsky and other Jacobin admirers, a greater number, since Babeuf is often identified as the first revolutionary communist.
Where Heller et al. zero in on “the Babuvian violent homogenization of human needs” and identify it as the underlying principle of Soviet-dominated societies, they should be seen as engaging in a dialogue with the French Revolution as the “unfinished project of modernity” in the manner described above, but with a twist: they do so as part of an effort at socialist self-criticism that they think is necessary in order to really understand how the idea of socialism descends into totalitarian dystopia.
So what then, to be said about Babeuf? His biographer E. Belfort Bax refers to his rise and fall as “the last episode” of the French Revolution, since his notoriety began only in 1795, and ended a year later in 1796 with his arrest by the Directory the along with the other leading Babuvists from the Society of the Pantheon. The Babuvist conspiracy was pretty much doomed from the start, in that Babeuf managed to make bitter enemies of both the Thermidorian leaders and also the remaining Jacobins.
Babeuf had the misfortune to take the calls for Equality (e.g., Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen) literally, even though the upshot of the thing was more about the end of hereditary privileges and feudalism than it was a radical program to address the social question, to liberate all humanity from suffering and want.
The decisive element here is not simply hyper-capitalism itself, aided by the big-data driven internet of everything.
In marshalling the degree of zeal and general participation needed to affect a revolution rather than a mere revolt, to break with the divine right of kings, the movement had unleashed something else along the way, namely “Man” as the subject of universal history. The combination of this awakening of modern universalist consciousness coupled with the uncontrollability of process and outcomes gave rise to a palpable feeling for the historical sublime that fueled Jacobinism in its declared state of emergency and institutionalization of state terror. Where the Girondists fretted about forms of government, the Jacobins swept in trying to “ride the wave of people power” wherever it was headed, hoping to stay “within the curl.”
As Hannah Arendt quotes Robespierre in On Revolution: “laws should be promulgated in the name of the French people, instead of the French Republic.” Against this backdrop, Babeuf therefore, was all for the sans-culottes, the poor men of the street. This is why he was with the Jacobins initially, then renounced the Terror, then broke bitterly from the Thermidoreans and later became a Robespierre apologist, when redistribution stopped with the nobles and ecclesiastical property.
Drawing on early utopian socialist sources, the Babuvists called for the end of all private property to check the rise of a new wealthy class and in doing so relied upon the assumption that human needs were everywhere the same and could be dictated from above in the name of the common good. Unlike later utopian socialists, who tended to found small, highly idealistic intentional communities, the Babuvian program (naïve, rough sketch that it was) would have required an unprecedented level of centralization and social control, certainly well beyond anything ever seen under the Bourbon dynasty.
Hyper-Capitalist Tech Solutionism & Dictatorship Over Needs
It is interesting to note that in describing Soviet-dominated society as dictatorship over needs, and in rejecting the option of simply referring to this system by way of its structural determinants as state capitalist, Heller et al. make some comments about why liberal capitalist states, especially those with mixed economies, have not likewise devolved into some version of the dictatorship over needs. I will use a short reflection on these comments as a way to bring this all back around to our present stage of advanced capitalism, wherein we find the emerging hyper-capitalist tech solutionist dystopia.
First, there is the fact that capitalism’s tendency is generally to differentiate and refine human need possibilities in the pursuit of market share and profit (yesterday I had to have coconut water, now its La Croix essenced seltzer).
And just as the element of competition continually defines new needs to be satisfied by marketed commodities, so too market competition has generally worked against the impulse toward the centralization of “the management of all social affairs in the hands of an increasingly powerful state as master and tutor of society.”
Another basis of limitation for the realization of this particular dystopia under conditions of market capitalism, is Heller et al. point out, is that capitalism’s longstanding dalliance with political liberalism tends to restrict the tendency toward the “total subjection of the workforce to the power centers of capitalism.” Where liberalism holds sway, it turns out, at least some groups are spared effective slavery (even if this relative inefficiency is paid for by the maintenance of an abject underclass ideologically singled out based on group characteristics).
In yet another twist, Heller et al. actually speculate that the manifestation of the dystopian centralization as dictatorship over needs in Soviet-dominated society is actually a tendency latent in industrial capitalism that was able to metastasize and grow under the nutrient condition of the “Jacobin streak” of revolutionary socialism.
Be this as it may, we have the benefit of having witnessed the maturation of the neoliberal phase of advanced technological capitalism since the publication of Dictatorship over Needs in the early nineteen eighties, and there are a number of features of the present circumstance that lead one to suspect that these limitations/disincentives on the emergence of a similar dystopia are even now being transcended.
We can see the signs of this new reality of global neoliberal governmentality playing out in various complementary ways on the terrain of hyper-capitalist technological solutionism that we have been describing in the prior installments of this post: the increasing commercialization of the human condition, reflecting the degree to which the market regulates the social and public political sphere; the increasing development of a generalized rentier economy as the mature finance-capital strategy for continued accumulation without workers or consumers as we have known them in the past; the ascendancy of algorithmic decision-making in all spheres of human endeavor, where the algorithms are designed to maximize profit-making efficiencies.
Technological solutionists (from the coneheads to the Ted Talking CEOs) have had a hard time seeing themselves, in terms of their values and motivations, as participating in the establishment of a new societal dystopia, the tech solutionist dictatorship over needs. Or at least they did, until 2017, when the social and political damage to our democracy from what Morozov and Musk both have called the “side-effects and unintended consequences” really began to sink in, and Silicon Valley definitively ‘jumped the shark.’
The decisive element here is not simply hyper-capitalism itself, aided by the big-data driven internet of everything. Market capitalism has always tried to tell us what our needs are, what commodities we need to have. But the increasing homogenization of human needs in and through central platform personalizations, is something quite new under the sun. The main thing here is what I have called (in the prior installments of this post) the increasing technological foreclosure of our ability to effectively advocate (socially, politically) for our individual and collective need satisfaction that is the thing that really warrants the appellation dictatorship over needs.
In the course of this ridiculously long final post on this topic, I have tried to soften the sense of conceptual dislocation some may feel in watching me leverage the characterization of “Soviet-dominated societies as dictatorship over needs” in order to articulate the nature of the emerging hyper-capitalist Silicon Valley dystopia.
I’ve attempted to do this by foregrounding the sense in which Heller et al. show that the decision for dictatorship over needs, as a political solution to the moral demand for totality on the terrain of history, descends from the “Babuvian violent homogenization of human needs” and in this sense is a permanent (dystopian) possibility on the game board of our political modernity. It is reasonable to apply this concept to the emerging hyper-capitalist Silicon Valley dystopia, therefore, because it can be shown that both the Soviet case and the Silicon Valley case are actually species of a common genus.
If this still does not convince you, I will end by offering you a final argument of a kind, by reminding you of an oft cited remark by Karl Marx, since it is fitting that he should have the last word here. The characterization of a society as dystopian under the rubric dictatorship over needs can be applied both to Soviet-dominated society, and to the case of the emerging hyper-capitalist tech solutionism because “all great, world-historical facts occur twice, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
