(introduction continued)
It is only when destiny is no longer mute and no longer ruling on a purely economic level, but from the start formulated within language and determined in a political way (as it was in communism) that man can become a being determined in and through language. At that point, man is given the opportunity to argue, to protest or agitate against decisions that would have otherwise been tragic. Such arguments are of course not always effective. They are often ignored or even repressed. But still, they are not without meaning. In any case, it is meaningful and justified to turn oneself against a political decision through language as a medium because these decisions themselves are captured in that same medium. Under the conditions of capitalism however, every criticism or protest is de facto meaningless. Because within capitalism language itself is a commodity, that is to say, language is essentially mute. Critical statements and protests are successful when they sell well and they are bad when they don’t. These statements do not in any way differentiate themselves from any other commodity in as far as they can be sold.
Capitalism does not operate within the same medium as its critique. Because capitalism and its discursive critique are incommensurable qua medium the two will never meet. For them to meet one must change society. One must make society a linguistic construct in order to change society in a meaningful way. Marx’s thesis that philosophy’s task is not to interpret society but to change it, can thus be formulated as follows: to change society it must first become communist. This explains the affection the critical mind has for communism. Only the communist total linguistic revolution of the human condition allows for the possibility of a fundamental critique.
One can think of the communist society as a society where power and the critique of power operate within the same medium.When you now ask whether the regime in the former Soviet-Union must be thought of as communist - and this question seems virtually unavoidable when speaking of communism - then the answer in light of the above given definition is affirmative. From a historical point of view, the Soviet Union has pushed the realization of communism further than any other society before it. In the thirties every kind of private property was abolished. This gave the political leadership the possibility to take decisions independent from private economic concerns. It was not the case that the private concerns where repressed. They simply didn’t exist anymore. Every citizen was a servant of the Soviet State, lived in a State house, shopped at a State shop and travelled through State territory using public transport which was State owned. What economic concerns could a man possibly have? His only concern was the welfare of the State, so that every citizen, regardless whether this happened in a legal or illegal way, which is to say through labour or corruption, could enjoy maximum benefit from the State. Thus, in the Soviet Union there existed a fundamental identity between private and public concerns. The only outward concern was of a military nature: the Soviet Union had to defend itself against foreign enemies. Already in the sixties it became clear that the military potential of the Soviet Union was such that a foreign threat no longer realistically existed. “Objectively” speaking then, the Soviet Union no longer had any conflicts. There was no internal opposition and an external threat was highly improbable. This is why it could permit itself to rely on its own political considerations and internal convictions for practical decisions. This political reasoning, because of its own dialectical nature, persuaded the Soviet leadership autonomously to abandon communism. This decision however does not change the fact that communism had been realized in the Soviet Union. As will be shown in what follows, it was this decision that completed the embodiment, the incarnation of communism.
