There is absolutely no contradiction between a “pessimist” view of our world as a valley of tears, of our life itself as a decaying corpse of a dead god, of non-being that is better than being, and a dedication to Communism. Today’s Communist has to accept the immanent despair of the human condition and propose Communism as a strategy to cope with it. In other words, one should drop the implicit humanist optimism of the standard Left: a human being has a potential for happy life, for solidarity and cooperation; suffering and despair predominate just in alienated societies… Without asserting the tendency towards evil as constitutive of being human (the figure of a utilitarian-egotist human nature is clearly a product of capitalist modernity), one should unconditionally leave behind the idea of some essential creative potential of human beings, which is thwarted in capitalism.
This idea was superbly and deployed in Ray Brassier’s outstanding Fatelessness: Freedom and Fatality After Marx, where he systematically and in a true philosophical spirit showed how “Marx’s concept of deactualization challenges Hegel’s yoking of possibility to actuality”:
“capital is not just a loosely coordinated aggregate of social phenomena but a self-reproducing social totality that, although of historically recent provenance, is compelled to subordinate the present and future of human history to ensure its own perpetuity. Thus capital is not just one of a succession of shapes of spirit but its fatal estrangement; a specific mode of production that coopts generic human productivity (human genus or Gattungwesen) for its own limitless yet pointless expansion. Thus humanity’s actualization in and through capital (working to live) is coupled to capital’s actualization in and through humanity (the exploitation of labour). But there is an asymmetry in this coupling because while labour’s actualization actualizes capital, the actualization of capital simultaneously actualizes and deactualizes labour. This deactualization is synonymous with exploitation, domination, immiseration, and all the other indices of human unfreedom under capital.
For Marx as for Hegel, freedom understood as the capacity for conscious self-determination is not just one human possibility among others; it is humankind’s essential, defining characteristic. Capital actualizes itself at humanity’s expense; what it obstructs is not just human possibility but the possibility of the human (humanity as possibility). This blockage signals something awry in Hegel’s account of actuality. The possibility blocked by capital is not just something that could be but is not (less misery, suffering, or exploitation than currently exists); it is something that should be but cannot be under capital: human liberation as the elimination of all the needless misery, suffering, and exploitation capital entails. This is not what Hegel disparages as the empty, ‘formal’ ought, untethered to actuality and incapable of being actualized, but what Macdonald (extrapolating from Adorno) calls the ‘real ought’; the immanent, actualizable possibility of eradicating contingent suffering. This suffering is contingent in a twofold sense: it is unnecessary for human actuality yet necessary for capital’s actuality.”[1]
From my standpoint, Brassier here re-Aristotelianizes Marx, mobilizing the tension between the essential possibility of being-human and its contingent actualization. For Hegel actualization is a truth of a possibility, i.e., it brings out what a possibility effectively amounted to – say, from Hegel’s standpoint, Stalinism was the truth of the Leninist (or even Marxist) project, not just its secondary deviation. For Marx, there is a split in every actualization, and this split becomes palpable in capitalism: the creative potential that defines being-human and tends towards its actualization effectively is actualized in capitalism (workers collectively produce immense material and spiritual wealth), but this actualization is simultaneously the workers’ de-actualiztion, their reduction to poor, suffering, dominated and exploited instruments of capital’s self-reproduction. This de-actualization is not necessary, or, differently put, it is necessary just for the reproduction of capital, while the creative human essence immanently contains the possibility of eradicating contingent suffering and domination. A revolutionary effort is sustained precisely by the awareness that capitalist actualization is something historically contingent that could be abolished.
I think this critique of Hegel should be rejected from the very Marxist standpoint. In Grundrisse Marx makes it clear that only in and through capitalism the working class emerges as a substance-less subjectivity which can then (through the revolutionary act as a collective subject) re-appropriate its alienated substance as its own product. Exploitation and domination are thus necessary for human actuality: they give rise to the subject of potential liberation, and this is why Marx even says that capitalism is already liberation in itself (and will become for itself through a revolution). Pre-capitalist societies are less “alienated” than capitalism because in them workers are still reduced to moments of the organic social process of production, i.e., they still appear to have their proper place within a social totality and are not reduced to a “place of no-place.” One should be careful not to confuse this movement with the standard misunderstanding of the Hegelian triad: it is not that the (collective) subject objectivizes itself in its product in which it no longer recognizes itself and thus (mis)perceives it as an alien entity, finally recognizing itself in it and appropriating it as its own product. There is no subject prior to alienation: it is the process of alienation itself which creates the subject in its distinction to the objective order.
To go to the end in this direction, what happens in the third moment of a dialectical movement is neither that the subject recognizes itself in its other, appropriating it as its own product, nor does the subject recognize itself in its other in the sense of acquiring a fixed proper place in it. The solution is a properly Hegelian one: the subject recognizes itself in the lack/inconsistency/impossibility that traverses the Other; it experiences itself as correlative to the lack in/of the Other. The implication of this stance is that the only appropriate ontology of revolutionary Marxism is a radical ontological pessimism, which is why another key name is to be added to the list of ontological pessimists: Philipp Mainländer, a more or less forgotten German “philosopher of pessimism” from mid-19th century who split from Schopenhauer. While Mainländer follows Schopenhauer in his basic claim that the only redemption is death, a return to the void, for him Will is not a will to live (which we should fight to extinguish) but the will to die, to vanish.
So how did our world of suffering arise in the first place? In a crazy cosmic extrapolation, Mainländer interprets creation as a kind of Big Bang in which the singularity of God (a name for the primordial Void) exploded, i.e., in which he killed himself, dispersing himself into a chaotic multitude: “The world is nothing but the decaying corpse of God.” And since “non-being is better than being,” all of creation strives to return to the primordial Void.[2] Here we should disagree with Mainländer: the explosion does not follow the divine Void; it is itself the primordial fact. This is the only way to reply to the obvious counter-argument: why did God not remain a peaceful Void? Yes, the primordial fact is the death drive, but this drive is not (as Freud himself sometimes misunderstands his own discovery) a tendency towards nirvana; it is uncannily close to an obscene immortality, a drive which insists beyond the circle of life and death.
Mainländer’s philosophy was for him not just a theory. It involved a full engagement (like Otto Weininger’s thought). The day he received copies of his Philosophy of Redemption, he accepted that he did what he could for the benefit of humanity and decided to kill himself, subsequently hanging himself on April 1, 1876 (April Fool’s Day!). But here comes a big surprise: he considered another reason to remain useful to humanity and go on living, namely a radical Leftist political engagement. (He did not take this path because his sister, to whom he was very close, opposed Leftist politics.) The contrast between Mainländer and Schopenhauer’s political conservativism and anti-feminism strikes the eye: for Mainländer, the fact that for a large majority of people life is one long suffering and misery pushed him to social engagement to lessen suffering – a convincing case of how ontological pessimism goes hand in hand with compassionate radical politics. Mainländer goes very far in this direction, as he argues not only against Schopenhauer but also against Buddhism:
“while these systems provide pathways for individual alleviation of suffering, they fall short of addressing the broader societal implications of existential suffering. He contends that such quietisms can perpetuate injustice by failing to empower those who lack the means to achieve personal moral development. For Mainländer, the ethical pursuit of personal goodness must be accompanied by a commitment to social justice, ensuring that all individuals have access to the education and resources necessary to develop an awareness of the lack of value of life.”
The central premise of Mainländer’s activism is thus that a truly pessimistic ethics must advocate for the dismantling of social and political structures that perpetuate inequality and suffering. The pursuit of social and political equality is a natural extension of the compassion that arises from recognizing existence as fundamentally evil. This perspective leads him to champion not only Communism but also the free love movement (freie Liebe), including feminism and gay rights, as essential components of a just society:
“Communism serves as a vehicle for achieving social and economic equality, allowing individuals to transcend the selfish impulses inherent in the will to survive. By eliminating class distinctions and ensuring equal access to education and resources, Mainländer believes that society can cultivate a collective commitment to alleviating suffering.”[3]
Should we be surprised that two great figures of German Social Democracy in the late 19th century, August Bebel and Eduard Bernstein, sympathized with Mainländer? Today, in a society in which the striving for pleasure and happiness fully displays their self-destructive potential, only figures like Mainländer can save us.Notes
[1] To appear in 2025 at MIT Press.
[2] See Philipp Mainländer, Philosophy of Redemption, Brisbane: Irukandji Press 2025.
[3] Summed up from Philipp Mainländer – Wikipedia.
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