gathering that prevents in advance every exception. That is to say: the possession of power must unfold the possibility of overpowering ever anew from out of itself. This possibility, however, undermines dictatorship, because the latter brings with it a petrification at one level of power and excludes itself from the open realm of the unconditional. On the other hand, the empowering of power demands the assimilation of all forms of power, and of all those who have thereby been placed under power, into uniformity. This uniformity also removes every mark of distinction from that possession of power that is alone appropriate to the essence of the unconditional empowering of power, and does so in such an essential manner that it ruthlessly thrusts the possessors of power into inconspicuousness.
The uniformity that essentially prevails in power's empowering is not an empty homogeneity of power relationships, but rather the fundamental law, unfolded in terms of power itself, of that impulse which impels power into the unconditional nature of its essence. On occasion the implementation of power betrays this fundamental law of all empowering of power in a scarcely heeded and still less pondered phenomenon: the more power finds its way into its essence, that is, intensifies itself, the more forceful the impulse toward the intensification of power becomes. The more forcefully this impulse imposes itself, however, the more decisively it asserts itself as what is "natural." Power's empowering thus betrays its "nature," that is, the ground of the conditions of its possibility: unconditional empowering of itself into limitless power over itself that requires no goal. The continual intensification of power is not some lack of restraint that it first exploits, but rather the integrity of its ownmost "nature," in accordance with which the assimilation of everything and everyone into the common element (commune) of unconditional empowering regulates the impulse of power in advance. Power's empowering into the unconditional aspect of machination and from out of the latter is the essence of "communism." What goes by this name is here thought neither "politically" nor "sociologically," neither in terms of "world-view" nor "anthropologically," indeed not even merely "metaphysically," but is conceived rather as that ordering of beings as such and as a whole that marks the historical era as that of the consummation, and thereby of the end, of all metaphysics. This concept of "communism," thought from out of the history of beyng, may at first seem very arbitrary, especially as it does not directly name those "communistic" phenomena that are historiographically familiar. For the conventional term "communism" means the common pertaining to the equal: that each within this "order" of a particular humankind has to work equally much, to earn equally much, to consume equally much,