archive : s0metim3s

°National Socialism + Work

April 30, 2005

Werner Hamacher, “Working Through Working” Modernism/Modernity 3.1 (1996) pp.23-56

“Of all that has worked toward, furthered, and offered its services to National Socialism; of all that made it what it was; and of all that survives it without the most immediate horror, the most banal, self-evident and, therefore, most easily forgotten could also be the most effective. It is something that cannot primarily and in every instance be considered fascistic; something that has a very long and, many would say, venerable, mythological, theological, and philosophical prehistory; and in this history, especially in its most recent segment, it is what has been conceived of as a determination of man’s essence. This banal, self-evident, and even still today widely presumed human factor is work. Work did not only organize what in fascism was crude violence and authority. The wish for work as the form of a remunerated life did not only aid Hitler’s party in its ascent to power. This party did not only present itself as a labor party. Nor was it alone capital (according to Marx’s handy formula, money that breeds itself, this self-producing and self-working capital) that paved the way for the Nazi clique. The call to work–to work on the country, work in industry, to work on the “people” and for the “people” of workers, to work on arms, to work with fist and brow, to work against everything and everyone who was said to be hostile or merely foreign to the work of the people–this call to work pervaded and determined the entire ideological, social, and political organization of the fascist epoch.”