Premier: In 2033, we will drink Bavarian-Metro 2033

On the wire city of Tallinn (sic!), Hello. In the previous two articles concerning the Cyberpan and the last two parts of the Deus Ex, I often touched the theme of fascism, which is an integral part. My attitude towards him (hint: negative) is quite understandable of them. However, to my shame, I completely forgot fascism to determine and walked mainly on some external signs, not touching the essence. The confrontation of the fourth Reich and the Red Line in the series of books "Metro 2033" and the games on them, it seems to me, is a great reason to speculate about the essence of the phenomenon, its understanding and embodiment. Including I propose to touch on its antipode – both in life and in the world of the metro.

In order not to be unfounded, I decided to resort to meanness, to make a move not even with a horse, but rather a board: I decided to get acquainted with the program documents of the main ideologists, theorists and practitioners of communism and fascism, with the "manifesto of the Communist Party" (to. Marx, f. Engels – 1848) and with the "Doctrine of Fascism" (b. Mussolini, d. Gentille – 1932). Let’s talk, as they say, substantive.

Important note: despite the fact that both documents are absolutely open on the network, some laws can prohibit their publication and distribution, so I will refrain from direct quotes and links. Nevertheless, you can check all the above yourself if such a desire arises. I am opposed to the ban on any ideological works, because for building anything, to combat it, it is necessary to know what we are building and what we are fighting with. Otherwise, the result may be sad, which is illustrated to us by the subject of today’s conversation – a series of metro.

By the way, I came up with an excuse for a huge temporary period between the release of the games discussed and articles about them. I am not trying to explain to those who have unsettled before they get acquainted with the subject themselves, but only I propose an option to interpret what is happening in these games. Let’s say, I give the ground for thought and possible rethinking what I saw.

1. Communists in life
I’ll start with them, since fascism was largely created as a denial of communism, and therefore in many ways refers to it. As already mentioned, the program document of communist ideology is the "Manifesto of the Communist Party". Unlike three volumes of “capital”, which is rather a theoretical and even a little philosophical work, “manifesto” is a specific presentation of the goals and principles that everyone who calls himself a communist should adhere to.

If anything, I read the manifesto itself, and not this comic book

I’ll make a reservation in advance: if real Marxists are suddenly discovered among the readers who seriously studied “capital”, I apologize in advance if there are any distortions in my retelling. This is not from malicious, but only because it is already necessary to simplify and coarse superficial knowledge so as not to stretch the article and not turn a note about the game in the Marx essay in your own words.

Communists consider history as a process of development of society, caused by objective prerequisites. The history, according to Marx, is driven not by individuals, but by the masses of people, grouping, sharing labor and pushing forward scientific and social progress. From the point of view of Marxists, the means of production and property on them play a significant role in the development of society.

I will not hit the Marxist vision of history – it will be both long and tedious, and at the moment there is no need. We will skip the era of the primitive communal system, slavery and feudalism and dwell immediately on capitalism. At the moment, as the Communists tell us, the whole world is divided into two main opposing classes – these are hired workers and capitalists.

The same caricature

Workers – those who do not own the means of production and sell their work. Capitalists are those who owns the means of production and sells the results of someone else’s labor at their means of production. There are unimportant contradictions between them. First of all, they consist in the desire of workers to work less and get more and in the desire of the capitalists to drive more workers and pay them less.

At the same time, state power is in the hands of the capitalists, since wealth allows others to work in your interests. In the same states, this is quite legal and is called lobbying. Therefore, the Communists call the state an instrument for conducting the will of the dominant (owning means of production) of class to life, as well as the dictatorship of the ruling class. Therefore, including the Communists opposed modern democracies – they say, the selection of candidates is led by the capitalist class, newspapers and television, where they represent candidates, leads the capitalist class and votes also counts the capitalist class.

Thus, the Communists advocate the socialization of the means of production. That is, the ruling class should become workers-the vast majority of the population of the earth-Mother. Accordingly, the first communist states should be controlled by workers. For example, on a system of advice. That is, when collective farmers choose the chairman of the collective farm, he travels to the district congresses, where other chairmen choose the chairman of the congress, which travels to regional congresses, the next to republican ones, and in this way it turns out, for example, the Minister of Agriculture, which can be revoked at each step of this pyramid. That is, not paid candidates through the elections, the result of which are known to many in advance, but go from the bottom, from the workers, from the workers. Moreover, the Communists do not cling to the state, as they attribute to them. They argue that subsequently, when the whole earth becomes communist, as it is now all capitalist, and once used to be feudal, slave-owning or primitive communal-so, when the whole Earth becomes communist, the state will die as unnecessary.

Of course, the qualifications of workers in public administration are in doubt, but, for example, Lenin spoke about this. This is his famous quote, where he says that at the moment (at the beginning of the twentieth century), not every cook is able to govern the state, but their (Bolsheviks) The goal is that in the future it will receive this ability. That is, the population must form.

Why is it all the Communists? They give the answer to this question themselves. This is necessary to ensure the economic independence of each individual member of the society and to ensure each member of this society the opportunity to develop in what is interesting and self -realized as he wants. And I can’t help but notice a certain logic in this: you must admit, to engage, for example, music is much more convenient when all the necessary instruments are available to all of you, when you know that the studio will not close tomorrow, when you have enough free time and effort and you know that you will always pay for the rental of the premises.

2. Nazis in life
The Doctrine of Fascism is a much less voluminous document than the “Manifesto”, and I read it right before writing this article. He criticizes all existing to the regimes and ideology, calling various reasons for their failure, but the main postulates are such. Fascism is corporatism, totalitarianism as a primacy of the state, imperialism and a conquest policy.

The state in Mussolini is a Ninewin Casino certain entity that interferes with all aspects of the life of citizens. It leads the economy, and politics, and moral, and cultural, and the spiritual aspects of the life of the population. Certain parallels with the Soviet Union may arise here, but there is a significant difference.

Fascism denies the principle of the class struggle on which the Bolsheviks were based. The state in fascism should allegedly remove the disagreements between workers and capitalists, supporting some and killing the appetites of others. In fascism there is no conversation about the destruction of private ownership of the means of production, which is the main goal of Marxists. On the contrary, workers and capitalists should be cooperated in the interests of the state and seize living space for the nation, which the state forms. For people who believe that fascism and Nazism are different things, I will emphasize: for the first time, Hitler spoke about the seizure of living space in the interests of the nation, but Mussolini.

There should be only two sites

In theory, the fascist state is a kind of supraclass structure, this is the spirit of the nation. The Doctrine Mussolini says that the nation is the state, and that the interests of the state are the interests of the nation. The state, as it were, takes control of the enterprise, and thus acts as a single corporation, where every worker does not work for its own good or the good of the enterprise, but for the good of the nation, the state.

Therefore, for example, the state may well use power methods to disperse strikes and demonstrations, because the workers who have arranged them do not trust the state, the nation that will take care of them and harm it, violating the work of enterprises – they swing the boat. Therefore, it can track their activities, imperial to them, say what to read, what to look at and whom to listen. Roughly speaking, if the Communists say that the people form the state, then fascism says that the state forms the people.

Acceleration of a strike at the Ford factory in the Democracy citadel

Since fascism relies quite strongly on a variety of metaphysics and spirituality, one of the instruments of the formation of the people in fascism is religion. Mussolini proposed taking the most suitable people, that is, to take into account national specifics. In Italy, for example, it was Catholicism. In Germany – Lutheranism. Russian emigrants who professed fascist ideas, largely rested on Orthodoxy.

In general, fascism offers to think less and act more. Mussolini separately emphasized the meaning of faith, which, unlike thoughts, gives rise to action. When the theoretical doctrine of fascism did not exist yet, but there were only organizations involved in putting order in Faterland, they, as Mussolini wrote, were guided by faith, not theory. And this is another, third important difference between fascism and communism – an idealistic approach.

Communist theory is based on materialism, on the objective knowledge of the world, logic and a critical approach. In principle, Marxism itself is not so much a theory or ideology as a method of cognition of the world. “Firearm method,” so Mayakovsky wrote about him. Fascism rests on spirit, on blood kinship, faith and other shamanism.

In order not to return to the topic of fascism, this part I would like to end this definition of George Dimitrov, given to him in the Leipzig process, where they tried to demonstratively award the reaches of the Reichstag. It didn’t work out.

Fascism is an open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, most imperialist elements of financial capital … Fascism is not a supraclass power and not the power of a petty bourgeoisie or lumpen proletariat over financial capital. Fascism is the power of the financial capital itself. This is an organization of a terrorist reprisal with the working class and the revolutionary part of the peasantry and the intelligentsia. Fascism in foreign policy is chauvinism in the most gross form, cultivating zoological hatred of other nations.

So. Fascism is not a radical new socio-economic formation, not an alternative to capitalism, and even more so not some special way there. This is capitalism, in the most animal of its manifestation. Capitalism aimed at the total war. Agree, even the existing form of democracy for a total war is not very effective. Only if you are not the United States, fenced off from the world by two oceans and not sitting on the fence, thinking who would now give out a Land Lease: faithful and devoted British or Soviet communists? And then, by the way, fascist sprouts were present in the States before World War II. Take an interest in the fate of the American Japanese before and especially after the bombardment of Perl Harbor. Or overclocking of strikes at Ford enterprises during the Great Depression. In crisis situations, capitalism is inclined to fascism in itself, without any bright leaders, totalitarian leaders and muddy doctrines.

I have a deer of the eyes of my eyes, and you know, what such democracy does not seduce me

3. Communists in the subway
In the books and games of the metro series, the Communists appear in a completely different quality. They make plans to capture the entire metro, infect a peaceful station with combat virus, then burn it under the pretext of suppressing the spread of infection … In general, terrible people.

Sonderkommand, b*t

Residents of the Red Line go in line, Chekists sniff through all their stations, there are commissars in dusty helmets everywhere, ready to grab you right on the spot, pronounce the verdict and personally be carried out. The absence of documents says that you spy, flight outside the line says that you are a spy, condemnation of the party general line says that you are a traitor, a step to the right is an attempt to escape, a step to the left is an attempt to escape, a jump on the spot – a provocation.

At the same time, the red line stations are full of red banners, Soviet posters and stretch marks with recognizable font. The Communists willingly use Soviet terminology, abbreviations and any other newly.

Another stamp about the Communists flashes in Last Light’s ending: the storm of D6 looks like a natural grain-rash, when crowds of simple equipped fighters are trying to take the number of defenders of the complex. I remembered the reasoning of some lovers of history regarding the Great Patriotic War and the victory of the Soviet Union in it. Like, the USSR won thanks to numerical superiority. True, they do not take into account that the lion’s share of the losses of the Soviet side is non-non-community, that is, a peaceful population, destroyed by the Wehrmacht and the S-SS, as well as the fact that not only Germany fought against the USSR on its territory, and it would not be entirely correct to compare their losses, but that there would be something to do here. Too many different things were lied in due time, I can’t blame these people in ignorance.

The meat was flooded

4. Nazis in the subway
I can say only one thing about them: the authors honestly tried. The Nazis have both mega-tulms with a system of supplying nutrient poisons through ventilation, and concentration camps for mutants, and measurements of the muzzle with a caliper. There is a Fuhrer, and all sorts of non -Uber/Oberta/Schutrmbanfürrers, and the vivid emotional speeches of the bosses in front of the crowd, and banners with a stylized letter “R”, denoting “Reich” – all external attributes. Philistine idea of ​​fascism.

Wollt ihr den Totlen Krieg?

Panopticum, everything is like Francisco Franco

They also make plans to seize the metro, for which, by the way, they conclude an alliance even with “hated bourgeois” from the Hansa-which, by the way, is a very interesting allusion to cooperation of corporations like Ford or Coca-Cola, a company with Hitler Germany before the start of World War II, despite all the prohibitions and embargo. It’s only a pity that the allusion is most likely random.

5. What is wrong in general
It is not very clear what gives the leaders of the Reich and the Red Line power over their citizens. And if, for example, the three stations standing very close can still obviously obey any bright, charismatic leader, then this is why sixteen stations stretched along the metropolitan actually from the edge to the edge, obey one center-it is incomprehensible.

To provide all the fighters of the line with weapons, cartridges, food and equipment, there must be weapons, food, warehouse, and transport stations there. And camps for the preparation of fighters, and schools, and hospitals. And I, as it were, do not ask where it is all – it is clear without words that it is. I am rather interesting why not a single weapons, for example, the station did not declare independence, not enlisted the support, for example, Hansa and did not try to separate the force? Moreover, many are fleeing the red line, and such a station could seriously jam the power resource of the Communists.

You see, it’s like Kafka’s novel “ZAMOK ". I will now not show up in any case, but only give an example of the same understanding of the authorities. Like, the one who runs rules. Why he rules? He has power. What gives him this power? But the dog knows him, he is just the main. Kafka, criticizing the “castle” of the bureaucratic apparatus, tried to show the helplessness of a person in confrontation with the state machine – but he did not understand and could not show the foundations of this machine to which she rules. Roughly speaking, if I now sit at the head of a state, it turns out that I can’t do very, much more-much more than I can.

6. Why don’t I swear
Yes, I am surprisingly calm when I describe the metro. I just suddenly realized that it was believable. Indeed, the developers on a living example showed what happens when a person builds something that he does not understand.

What is the likelihood that of all fifteen million people in Moscow, among the forty thousand saved, at least one real Marxist will be understanding what communism is and how to do it? And what is the probability that among them will be, for example, a fan of philosopher Ilyin, who understands the essence of fascism? And would they really listen to them if they wanted to build the fourth Reich or the Union of Soviet Socialist Stations? That’s it.

And the characters of the metro, adopting the ignorance of the developers, created really naturalistic images of post -apocalyptic ideologies. The "Communists" copy the aesthetics and external paraphernalia of the USSR, not understanding what distinguished him from the rest of the states of their time. "Nazis" are looking for mutants and measure the skulls, fighting for the racial purity of the subway. Therefore, they turned out to be so similar: in the world of the metro they would really be similar, they are really related that neither the first nor the latter understand what to do, but those and others want something.

It seems to me that if you take the prescribed metro in post-core Moscow and give it a couple of decades for a couple of decades, then if you accept the exit to the surface as something impossible, we will see a kind of Lower London from the novel Nile Gaiman “Nikoen”-with underground feudalism, stations-state-united sugrains. With underground kings, knights and serfs. In my opinion, a quite possible outcome. I propose to discuss in the comments.

7. Afterword
Heavy material. And for reading and for writing. And I promise that subsequently I will try to avoid such footcloths and will write about something more understandable and cheerful. For example, I have a lot to say about Andromeda, which has not yet been announced.

Most likely, this sheet will not find a response in the audience, but it had to be written. First, give the debt under the previous articles. Secondly, I do not want my articles to be just something entertaining. We live in a strange time, and I do not want to suddenly be surrounded by worshiping young people going to bring racial cleanliness in the state. And for this it is important to know how this can turn out.

The authors clearly wanted to hint that communism and fascism are phenomena of one kind. Outside the metro, I am categorically disagreeable with them, and such statements only bring the already possible victory of fascism. But inside the metro I am quite ready to support them. When you do not know what you are doing, and try to copy only external signs, external paraphernalia, then it makes no difference that you are building: fascism, communism, monarchy, democracy – you still will not get the desired. Therefore, my wish: try to figure it out, see the essence and carefully filter the invested in your head.
Tallinn out. Live, Die, Repeat.