Tyb
"The Socialist Phenomenon" by Igor Shafarevich
SOCIALISM = DEATH INSTINCT
In the Freudian view (first expressed in the article "Beyond the Pleasure Principle"), the human psyche can be reduced to a manifestation of two main instincts: the life instinct or Eros and the death instinct or Thanatos (or the Nirvana principle). Both are general biological categories, fundamental properties of living things in general. The death instinct is a manifestation of general "inertia" or a tendency of organic life to return to a more elementary state from which it had been aroused by an external disturbing force. The role of the life instinct is essentially to prevent a living organism from returning to the inorganic state by any path other than that which is immanent in it.
Marcuse introduces a greater social factor into this scheme, asserting that the death instinct expresses itself in the desire to be liberated from tension, as an attempt to rid oneself of the suffering and discontent which are specifically engendered by social factors. In the Utopia proposed by him, these goals can be realized, Marcuse believes.
He describes this new state in an extremely general way, making use of mythological analogies. Against Prometheus, the hero of repressive culture, he sets Narcissus and Orpheus bearers of the principles upon which his Utopia is built. They symbolize "the redemption of pleasure, the halt of time, the absorption of death; silence, sleep, night, paradise the Nirvana principle not as death but as life."
"The Orphic Narcissistic images do explode it [reality]; they do not convey a 'mode of living'; they are committed to the underworld and to death." About Narcissus he says: "If his erotic attitude is akin to death and brings death, then rest and sleep and death are not painfully separated and distinguished: the Nirvana principle rules throughout all these stages."
The less the difference between life and death is, the weaker will be the destructive manifestations of the death principle: "The death instinct operates under the Nirvana principle: it tends toward that state of 'constant gratification' where no tension is felt a state without want. This trend of the instinct implies that its destructive manifestations would be minimized as it approached such a state."
"In terms of the [death] instinct, the conflict between life and death is the more reduced, the closer life approximates the state of gratification."
This view has a more concrete interpretation: "Philosophy that does not work as the handmaiden of repression responds to the fact of death with the Great Refusal the refusal of Orpheus the liberator.
How can they when the would be guillotine controllers are themselves beheaded?