Der Arbeiter
In 1932, Ernst Junger published the first edition of Der Arbeiter (The Worker), one of the most penetrating and controversial investigations of modernity to have appeared during the 20th century. At that time, Junger – later to become an anarchist – was one of the most prominent voices of the young German national-bolshevik movement, and one of the sources of inspiration for Adolf Hitler’s party. Decorated as a hero after WWI, Junger wrote Der Arbeiter both as a description of a future world in which the ‘form’ of the Worker (a new human ‘type’ which expresses itself through ‘technic’) would take dominion over the world, and as an invitation to take part to the ‘total mobilization’ operated by the new regime of ‘total work’.
Mixing a crystalline prose with ante litteram cyberpunk visions, Der Arbeiter reads today as a bleak premonition of the world that is unfolding in front of our eyes. Its prediction of the rise of a ‘new race of the Worker’, transcending nationality and ethnicity, finds its realisation in the human landscape of today’s metropolises. Its description of a future ‘cult’ of work - so deep as to invade every aspect of the daily, social or personal, rational or emotional life – loses its sci-fi tone if applied to the world we live in. Junger’s vision of a world ‘totally mobilised’ by work appears to have found a much greater application within contemporary capitalism, than it ever did during the brief experience of national-socialist Germany. It might not be a coincidence that Heidegger’s text The Question Concerning Technology – deeply inspired by the book of his friend Junger – only appeared in 1949, under the dawning light of the new world order.
One of the recurrent analogies in Der Arbeiter is between the ‘volcanic’ battlefields of WWI, and the coming age of ‘total work’. As the fighters of the first world conflict discovered on their own skin, the industrialisation of war had transformed warriors and soldiers into little more than an armed version of factory workers. The ‘total’ element of the first and second world wars didn’t just lie in the systematic overspilling of violence to civil society, but in the deep connection between the new form of conflict and the total character of contemporary work. Not only human and machine became one, like a modern mechanical centaur, but the very logic at the heart of the machine also begun to structure human life. Similarly, the military potential which always lies dormant within any technological innovation, begun to rear its head within all human actions, making their potential for military re-employment ever more apparent.
A drone’s job
Long gone is the time of Quixotic characters, raving against the introduction of fire-arms and the decline of chivalrous warfare. An equally long distance, however, seems to be growing between the current era and the time when the military profession had any visible mark of distinction from the dull routine of office work. In an age when biomimetic robots and unmanned drones increasingly take the place of flesh-and-blood fighters, soldiers acquire the features of mere white-collar operators. Little remains to distinguish the daily routine of a drone pilot – driving to the office in the morning, sipping bad coffee at the desk, fiddling with a keyboard all day, gossiping about the boss with other colleagues, driving back home at night – from that of any other office worker. It is no longer an exclusive privilege of the police to justify any action – however terrible – behind the phrase ‘I’m just doing my job’: truly, the job of the contemporary soldier tends towards a perfect reflection of that of the office operator, both in its cold dullness and in the lack of any perceived danger or moral responsibility.
As at the early stage of any epochal transformation of military technology, the unequal ability of different areas of the world to equip their troops becomes today brutally apparent. While in the Anglo-American army impractically overweight personnel remotely controls lean, steel drones, the Taliban army still carries impractically burdensome weapons on their lean shoulders. Yet, it might not be long until we will see institutional armies facing each other remotely, over new volcanic battlefields, through the avatar of their unmanned machines. The modern ‘war of materials’, inaugurated by WWI, might soon reach its accomplishment as a war between materials, where the cyclical destruction of excessive industrial supply – so crucial to a capitalist economy – will begin to resemble the ritualism of potlatch and medieval tournaments.
The World police State
Technological development isn’t the only force pushing warfare towards a close resemblance with the current regime of total work. As traditional imperial wars tend to be restricted to a shrinking global periphery, new areas of conflict surge at the very heart of the empires. While war takes on the characteristics of police operations abroad – as it is apparent in the rhetoric of recent Anglo-American expeditions, – policing within national borders assumes a close resemblance to military campaigns. Unmanned drones equally fly over enemy lines in conventional battlefields, or over rioting neighbourhoods in Western capital cities. Both military troops abroad and metropolitan police forces tactically divide unmanageable territories into small human communities, over which tactics of soft control and intimidation take turns with more dramatic episodes of full-scale armed occupation.
Once again, we can look back at Junger’s visions to imagine a possible development of the current situation. Already in his 1932 book - and even more clearly so in his 1960 text Der Weltstaat (The World State) – Junger envisaged the inevitable creation of an integrated global system of governance, which he described as a World State. As the world will move towards one, unified political system – predictably totalitarian in its nature – the very institution of war will slowly but steadily morph into full policing. Once traditional battlefields, over which unmanned robots will soon fight each other, will have finally entirely disappeared – together with the disappearance of the last nation state – the theatre of military operations will merge fully with that of traditional police operations, or of civil wars masked as disruptive public order. Police control will take the place of military conquest, and the dormant military potential of information technology will fully awake in the seamless fusion of the fields of work, entertainment, sociality, identity, police control and repression.
The Worker's race
The totalisation of work – as currently represented by its crowning as the arbiter of an individual’s feelings of personal and social worthiness – opens the most intimate human spheres to the strategies of new total police war. While the office (and both a call centre and a contemporary Western factory qualify as offices) becomes the space of control over war operations, all which escapes its walls implicitly candidates itself to become a potential battlefield. The soldier and the white-collar worker already share a bond of comradeship which runs deeper than their individual narratives of ethnicity, religion or citizenship. Against them – almost as naturally their enemies as different animals species are placed against each other – lies the horde of the non-Workers, of those who live outside the office. As long as a person remains within the total ‘us’ of the community of Workers, their soldier colleagues will always be at their side to defend them. As soon as the Worker is either ejected from the total office, or s/he decides to refuse and escape its logic, s/he is expected to automatically accept the sour destiny of taking home within the battlefield.
The line of precarity which runs between employment and unemployment, doesn’t only separate different levels of income or social recognition: under the convergence of total war and total work, it will also trace the military border between two asymmetrically opposed sides. Although still barely visible today, when all war will exist merely as policing, in the age of the World State, the discourse over the human type of the Worker – as envisaged by Junger as and presently pioneered by right-wing tabloids – will acquire the same characteristics and will entail the same consequences of the old, colonial discourses about race. Yet, while race, as it was traditionally understood, might appear difficult to negotiate and to acquire, the new race of the Worker will very much function as a bargaining tool in the interest of social cohesion and social control. By behaving appropriately, and appropriately accepting the imperatives of the total work morality of the World State, an individual will be allowed to enter the race of the Worker, placed under the protection of his office colleagues the soldiers. Conversely, by behaving inappropriately or under-performing, an individual will be stripped of his/her belonging to the chosen race, and will be relegated – however temporarily – to the lower, enemy world of non-Workers. Such belonging will remain fluid, always revocable and always precarious. Just when society will become inescapably and fully totalitarian, both in its extensive and intensive reach, the very possibility of belonging to it will be waved as the most desirable status: it will appear worth working very hard, just in order to be a Worker.
As it has already often happened in the past, technology will circumscribe the internal borders of such a society. The specific and individual combination of the buzzing sound of an unmanned drone and of the way in which it will resound in the feelings of safety or fear which it will produce in the heart of those who will hear it, will redraw the invisible boundaries between neighbourhoods, neighbours, or even different stages in one person’s life. After the long truce which begun at the end of WWII, war will become again a daily experience and a constant threat even for Westerners: households will shift in and out of battlefields, just as they will slip in and out of work. What is now the low and squalid grassing against so-called ‘benefit scroungers’, will then become a vital function of military intelligence. Under the watchful eye of one’s soldier colleagues – as all colleagues will be soldiers – any episode of work refusal or sabotage will become an act of desertion and the dangerous statement of one’s enmity to society. Silence will be golden, and as solid as medieval fortifications; communication, especially if foolishly honest, will become as dangerous as ancient roads running through a forest. Emotions will count as flags, and they will be as concealed or as tactically exposed as insignia were on vessels sailing through dangerous seas. War will find its new home in the depth of every person’s heart, thus accomplishing the fateful trajectory which begun a century ago, in the muddy battlefields of WWI. In the words of Italian war poet Giuseppe Ungaretti:
Of these houses
nothing remains
only the shreds
of a wall
Of so many
who would talk to me
nothing remains
not even that
But in my heart
not one cross is missing
My heart is
the most ravaged village of all
