Awaiting his own execution after weeks of interrogation, the protagonist of Arthur Koestler’s 1940 novel Darkness at Noon, Rubashov, wonders at his place in history. He had been an architect of the revolution which brought his executioners to power, but now, decades later, his disagreements with “Number One” (a stand-in for Stalin) have led to his being branded a traitor. He is accused, dubiously, of having plotted to kill the head of state, but we are made aware this is just an expedient fiction. In reality, Rubashov’s fateful misdeed was that he had disagreed with Number One’s decision to pursue “Socialism in one country,” favoring instead a global emancipation of the world’s toilers. For party elites this dissensus was, given the imperiled position of the fictional Soviet-like state, tantamount to fomenting civil war. Rubashov is ultimately executed but not before being given the opportunity to perform the role of a despicable villain in a show trial; a task which he is told will be for the good of the party. Perhaps in the future, he is told, once the dust has settled, the secret archives will be made public and his true historic personage will finally see the light of day.
In the hands of present day liberals, Darkness of Noon reads as a searing indictment of totalitarian group-think. It is easy to see why. Rubashov’s interrogators are fanatics convinced that their places in history are unassailable. Abstract notions of truth and falsity, morality and immorality are, for them, subordinate to the perseverance of the state and its revolutionary logic. The other residents of Rubashov’s prison are presented as victims of a regime that obliterates subjects who do not fit neatly into this totalizing world view. My edition of the book has a blurb from polemicist Christopher Hitchens declaring that the book is of interest to “anyone who admires men of principle or who enjoys the battle of ideas for its own sake.” Read in this light, Rubashov appears as a valiant defender of individualist liberty in the face of a crushing, anonymizing bureaucratic apparatus. Such an interpretation inclines one towards moderation and individualistic liberty. This reading presumes that any pretensions towards world historical transformation, however laudable their aspirations, will surely culminate in totalitarian dystopia.
This liberal gloss evades Darkness at Noon’s unsettling, unresolved nuances. Though Rubashov harbors criticisms of the interrogators and the state they represent, he never abandons the emancipatory vision that he believes still might someday issue from their efforts. Rubshov’s prison-cell introspections show him wrestling not with the value of his socialist beliefs, but rather the place of his failure within the terms of a broader arc of history. Though very much a product of its interwar moment, Darkness of Noon raises timely political questions. Like Rubashov, we are historical subjects caught between temporalities. Like him, we have been habituated to a world that is collapsing and cannot easily discern the conditions that would enable us to build its alternative. In the next series of posts, I will attempt to offer some ways of navigating questions raised by Darkness at Noon with help from social and political theory.
The interrogators in Darkness at Noon are not ideological automata, but flawed characters who sincerely believe that they are agents of an epochal social transformation. In a revealing moment, Gletkin, the crueler of the novel’s two interrogators, asks Rubashov, seemingly out of nowhere, when he first received a pocket watch. Whereas Rubashov already had a watch as a child, Gletkin reveals that he was already sixteen before he learned “that the hour was divided into minutes.” Until the revolution, peasants from his village inhabited a different temporality, sometimes waiting for days for a train to come. Now, he boasted, the same village hosted the largest steel rail factory in the world. Other industrialized powers had decades to acclimate to the accelerating tempo of the world. Gletkin suggests that bringing peasants, like him, up to speed required extraordinary force and sacrifice. The necessity of such violence, he chides, could not be grasped by someone so privileged as to have been born into modern time (like Rubashov). Others needed to achieve it.1 It should be clear from the historical context that at stake in industrialization was not only achieving an abstract benchmark of modernity, but being able to viably compete with foreign imperialist powers who sought to suppress the socialist revolution from its inception. In real life, it was just such a breakneck transformation that enabled the Soviets to outproduce and defeat Hitler’s regime.
Facing this thorny moral calculus, Rubashov is forced to confront the question of whether his efforts to improve the world through revolution were worth it, even if he, too, was soon to be swallowed in its maelstrom of violence. In Gletkin, Rubashov sees an apparition of the sort of man that the revolution had produced. Whereas Rubashov was of the first generation, and so retained the vestiges of a morality and aesthetic sensibilities of the pre-socialist world, Gletkin’s subjectivity was forged in the revolution. In a moment of self-doubt, Rubashov likens his supercilious distaste for Gletkin to that of a chimpanzee, disgusted by the appearance of more advanced neanderthals. Perhaps, he considers, the world requires Gletkins to usher a more just world into being and Rubashov’s moral convictions are fossils from a bygone era.2
Still in the final hours of his life, Rubashov cannot help but imagine that this world that the revolution had created–its prisons, its over-confident faith in historical necessity, its cold logic without an “ethical ballast”–was somehow wrong. He imagines a version of events–perhaps playing out far in the distant future–that resolves his revolution’s contradictions. Significantly, for Rubashov, this hypothetical revolution would find a way to reconcile the particular subjectivities of individuals with the universal purposiveness of the collective:
Perhaps members of the new party would wear monks’ cowls and teach that only purity of means can justify the end. Perhaps they will disprove the theorem that a human being is the quotient of one million divided by one million and introduce a new arithmetic, based on multiplication: on the merger of millions of Is to form a new unity that is no longer an amorphous mass but maintains its I-character, the oceanic feeling reinforced and millionfold, within a universe that was boundless and yet closed within itself…3
Here, Rubashov is at his most Hegelian. It is not sufficient to elevate the masses as masses. It is not sufficient for the collective to only be bound together in abstract unity. Instead there must be some sort of harmonizing between society’s myriad particular interests, each endowed with a rich interiority that Rubashov likens to Freud’s porto-religious “oceanic feeling,” and the collective totality. Rather than ruthlessly subsuming the individual to the collective, a just socialist state would sublate its particularity. Individuals, through their participation in the collective would be made aware of the mutually constitutive nature of their own personhood and the social totality of which it is a part. As a consequence, both would be enriched in the service of one another.
For Geoff Mann, this reconciliation is the core aspiration of Keynesian economic and social thought. In his captivating In the Long Run We are All Dead, Mann argues that rather than merely trying to “save capitalism from itself,” Keynesianism is best read as an immanent critique of liberalism. Because capitalism produces scarcity and impoverishment, it necessarily produces the masses who Hegel termed “rabble”: people who are excised from meaningful reciprocal engagement with society and therefore are made antagonistic to it.4 The task of the state for Hegel, Keynes and more recently Piketty, is to prevent the ascendancy of the antagonistic anonymous mass that Rubashov had observed, and instead technocratically reabsorb the rabble into the social whole, thereby achieving “revolution without revolution.”5
Motivating Keynesianism (understood by Mann to extend before and after Keynes himself) is the notion that while it’s not the fault of the poor that they are destitute, their destitution renders them inadequate political subjects. For this reason, the Terror loomed large in Hegel’s imagination as a consequence of mass power (while he also admired the theoretical achievements of the revolution) and Keynes was vehemently opposed to communism (while basically being sympathetic to its motivating aspirations). But is it not a kind of bourgeois utopianism to suspect that Keynes’ sound technical solutions, and Hegel’s ideally functioning civil society are sufficient to correct the inherent antagonisms endemic to capitalism? What are the means through which the rich and powerful might be convinced to cede some of their wealth, for the good of the whole? Is it possible to address these myopias while also taking seriously Keynes and Hegel’s anxiety, echoed by Rubashov, that the people who exist now may be ill-disposed to create the just world that they desire?
Sparse nocturnal alienation, captured as doom jazz by Chicago’s Nighttime Ensemble:
Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, (New York: Scribner, 2019), 200.
Ibid., 203.
Ibid., 232.
For more discussion of Hegel and “the rabble” see this post.
Geoff Mann, In the Long Run We are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy, and Revolution, (New York: Verso, 2019).
Whether or not it's a sort of bourgeois utopianism rests on whether or not the destitute are truly inadequate political subjects (assuming we're using "utopianism" as a pejorative).
If it is the resources of education, afforded to us by the privelage of our class, that have allowed us to achieve the kind of trust and cohesion that makes a revolution feel viable, then does it not follow that those who lacked that privelage will likely lack that cohesion as well? Can a house be built with mortor that doesn't bind? And once that cohesion is achieved, will we need to "convince" the wealthy to cede power, or will we be powerful enough to take it from them?
I dream about a day when the wealthy are beaten at their own game, leaving them humiliated and taking away their sense of ethical superiority, by the educated masses. But maybe that is the utopianism.