I don’t know why I have to care if Adorno was passive in terms of revolutionary conflict. Sure, he was, yes, and so were many others who have contributed to our collective political understanding. I take what I can from these people and I move on. If there are contradictions in their work, I address those. There is no use in talking about Adorno’s pacifism if it’s a means to toss out work that is perfectly up to the task of at least partially helping us understand our current situation. I don’t care about the character features of the person who wrote it! Sometimes writers are cowards!

Yet the fact of their writing being an aid to our moment saves them! These sad, passive, academic loafs, in the end, contributed! I don’t need to have seen them get medals of honor from the USSR or China to know they’ve contributed!

“Adorno betrayed us by not picking up a gun. Therefore, I will take all the work I have read by him and decide to find it unhelpful, even though I know for a fact it is helpful. I will decidedly live in an upside-down fantasy land so I can get back at Adorno for not doing a mass shooting. He should have worked out and built muscle mass. He should have flexed his big strong biceps at everyone, and also should have picked up a machine gun and started shooting like Rambo. Instead, he only committed himself to worthless pursuits. Like theory. Ugh.”

I swear to you that if you dis-invest in individualism entirely, it stops being a concern that Adorno did not live up to a violent revolutionary ideal, considering what he produced, and where that work ties to our current project. The ones who claim and demand the supposed selflessness of the violent revolutionary image are speaking with the master’s tongue, and are the most ensnared by patriarchal and capitalist notions of the individualism. That capitalism is contradictory, and has multiple expressions of the individual, does not change the fact that one such kind is stripping the ego of content beyond the glory of sacrificing itself on individualistic terms, before ever having the chance to shatter these limits altogether.

You can learn to appreciate even Adorno’s minuscule contributions when you stop imposing the ego’s form on top of every expression of social life you find in the world. Military selflessness is the ego stripped to its raw foundation. It is the ego stripped of all content, throwing itself into a volcano, committed to a refusal of the idea that life could be a value in and of itself, beyond subordination to pregiven terms of meaning. It is the raw grip power has on human life. It is the rawest expression of such power, that it conditions all human life to limit itself to a having its existence coded by such determinations. Power owns that form of life. Traversing such an individualistic frame of meaning is the only way to take that power away from this social order, on new terms that must be one’s own personally devised but socially instantiated symbolic purpose. The shared path through the limits of individualism must necessarily become a collective traversal of this form of subjectivity. We can persuade or agitate towards this, if not maneuver and push the conditions of our existence towards breaking down the material grounding of reified subjectivity, to clarify the better path.

It is convenient for the world’s powers that we are stuck with this manner of interpreting our existence, even down to notions of self-sacrifice. When all meaningful content of our individual life is blotted out, we still abide by this structure. We only think of what we can individually do, which usually amounts to sacrificing our very life for the continued benefit of our rulers and the system they rely on. Communism is not a form of rule that negates life, but only from the future. It traverses the individuated form that pushes “self” sacrifice, establishing new terms for social life altogether that no longer confine you numerically as a workable parcel of energy in the hands of power.

It should no longer be the case that 1+1+1+1+1 = 5 individuals who are thrown into the volcano. It should instead be a matter first of our task, then of the consciousness required for that task, and then finally, the hands needed to mold conditions in pursuit of that task, whether 5 or 5 billion. If revolutionary heroism is to retreat to counting yourself as “1” and then restraining your social contribution within the boundaries of a given individuated limitation, then we should be revolutionary cowards in the gaze of this demand. Dissolve your sense of “1” in the face of it. There is life beyond it.