A Letter on French Politics

Dear Jean-Paul,

I hope my letter finds you well. Much has changed since your departure to New Paris to teach at VU. Your former department, and university politics in general, have found themselves embroiled in one controversy after another, and there is no sign of things improving. As you well know, since the start of the war, the Commissariat has begun to worm its way into every institution with any amount of cultural power to ensure allegiance to the Communiste Internationale. While I am sure that you and I both are supporters of the political project at large, circumstances here have begun to make me question if the Commissariat, and some of my colleagues at the university, share the same vision of the radical freedom a Communist state could bring. I will start with the factional divide within the philosophy department here at the University, as it is a reflection of the division of thought that you see within Les Lorrains. Unfortunately for the larger project of Communism, the failures of the Bolsheviks two decades ago, and the tepid nature of the Socialists in Italy, Estonia, and Finland have yet to produce a proper model of what a true Communist government should look like. With this in mind, it appears that both here at the University and within the public zeitgeist, there are three major theories of what direction the Grand Revolution ought to take in its governance: Classical Marxism, Syndicalism, and Accelerationism.

The first is one that you and I are far too familiar with, Classical Marxism. This ideology is based solely on Marxist Historical Materialism and grounds itself in every way solely on the writings of Marx, with a pretty harsh critique of the post-Marxists and revisionist movement as a whole. These Classical Marxists, as they are called, suffer from a disease common amongst our fellow Communists, that of taking Marx's words as gospel rather than as theory. While I appreciate their adherence to Marx’s original vision, Marx did not provide a model for what the Communist government should look like after the revolution, instead preferring to default to vague affirmations, leaving the rest of us to merely speculate on what policies to implement. I have observed that among the Communist camps that have formed in this post-revolutionary world, the Classical Marxists are by far the most rigorous in their scholarship, but their rigidity has poisoned their will to action. This poison of rigidity works as a paralytic for them to put forward any meaningful political project or policy. As a result, the Classical Marxists often sit on the sidelines, critiquing others' positions without putting forward much in the way of a solution of their own.

The second ideological front, Syndicalism, unfortunately suffers from the opposite problem of the Classical Marxists. Syndicalism in itself is a very policy-oriented ideology, perhaps to its own detriment. The underlying ideas of the Syndicalists are very pragmatic in nature, taking the former systems and structures of our previous Capitalist government and reorienting them to serve the interests of the proletariat. While I won’t deny that there are a fair few scholars who take this project in good faith, it is undeniable to all those involved and those observant from the outside that Syndicalism, as it exists currently in the French state, is an ideology where the former capitalists have embedded themselves like fleas in a mattress. The vitriolic violence you and I witnessed at the beginning of the revolution was such that many rightly feared retribution and needed a new ideology acceptable enough in the eyes of the Commissariat to flock to without having to change all that much about what they actually believed. As a result, the ghost of Capitalism now haunts the specter of Communism in this Grand Revolution. How interesting it seems to the critics of Syndicalism that so many of the former owners of the factories and businesses that once crushed the workers under their boots now act as the managers overseeing the so-called “worker-owned” cooperatives that replaced them after the revolution. And how interesting still that the rights of those workers have only marginally improved as a result. I diagnose the problems of Syndicalism as two-fold. First, and perhaps most apparent, in its current form, there are far too many bad actors in the movement who use the ideology as a shield to perpetuate Capitalism. The second issue, and perhaps the more systemic one, is that in using the mechanisms of Capitalism to move closer to a Communist Utopia, aspects of the evil therein can easily seep in and pollute the change the honest Syndicalists seek, or worse still, slow the project of Communism to a grinding halt, much like the Liberals before them.

The third Ideology, Accelerationism, is the one that scares me the most. It was born mostly organically among the younger students and faculty alike. Although I suspect they are influenced by the more Freudian aspects of our department and contemporaries, I do not doubt that some of them have gained their ideas from the works of you and I, in our reckless pursuit of a better future. It is hard to call the Accelerationists a coherent movement or collective like we would the Classical Marxists or the Syndicalists, as there's no clear sign of leadership or consistency in their beliefs. Even the term to describe them, “Accelerationist,” was only coined last year in an article published in Les Lorrains. Despite the difficulty in defining them, I have observed that all of these Accelerationists have one thing in common, which is an adherence to what I have coined as Caustic Utilitarianism. Caustic Utilitarianism is the result of taking Bentham and Mills' Ideology to its furthest extreme, that is, that the happiness of future generations is magnitudes more immense than the happiness of the present living generation, and as such, all in every bit of suffering today is justifiable in achieving happiness for those yet to exist. This is obviously because the theoretical population of humanity is infinite (as presumably the next generation would have a generation of people after that, who will create another generation, so on and so forth ad infinitum therefore, their happiness is infinitely more important than any amount of suffering experienced today. By no means do I believe that any living Accelerationsist would ever openly admit to following this Caustic Utilitarianism as the primary motivator of their beliefs, but it is clear enough by their actions that these practitioners care little for the people of today. As you may well know, reading what news trickles into the colonies, political terrorism is at an all-time high, as is, according to my colleagues and close confidants in the physics department, the development of weapons systems far more terrible than what humanity has ever experienced. I am unsure if it is the cycle of violence we find ourselves trapped in in this post-revolutionary world, or the genuine disregard for traditional ethics, but regardless, it is clear that to the Accelerationists, the suffering of today will always be justified by the possible brightest future for tomorrow. I am committed to the cause of true Communism, and I am sure you are as well; as a result, I condemn their recklessness and violence to the highest degree. They forget that, at its core, Marx’s teachings are about improving the lives of the people suffering today, just as much as it is about building a utopia for those tomorrow.

I will leave you, my faithful friend, with my final, and perhaps most troubling conclusion about the Politics we see in France today. That is that although these three ideologies run rampant in the public and academic discourse of the future of the Communist project, I have come to realize that none of the three schools of thought account for what is truly happening in the Commissariat and the Charbonnier regime more broadly. Through my observations, I have found that France’s current government is not a Communist one at all, but rather is a twisted authoritarian regime disguised in the facade of Communism to maintain the public mandate. More and more civil liberties are stripped away day after day from our fellow comrades, all under the guise of “security” and “the greater good”. Marx would spit in the face of this government and vehemently condemn the atrocities it has already committed and its abandonment of democratic values. I become more and more disillusioned with the government with each passing day, and fear that one day its tolerance of my disillusionment will grow thin enough that I will be dragged away to some form of re-education slave camps where many of my fellow comrades already await me. I have decided to come to VU to escape the insanity of this new government. Perhaps there I will find comfort in the companionship of the world's greatest minds as you have, regardless of whether they will take me on as a faculty member. I would rather work amongst the janitorial staff there than continue to serve a government that will surely taint the legacy of Communism in history books written about this 'Great War'. If I do not arrive in the next few weeks, or worse still, if you don’t receive this letter, I hope that I am remembered as a voice of reason in this age of chaos, and more still as a true Communist in a sea of pretenders.