concealed history of beyng. Machination alone can place itself exclusively under an empowering toward itself and find in this something ultimate. Where meaninglessness attains power, and does so through the human being as subjectum, the one who calculates and marshals the calculability of himself and of all things, there the elimination of all meaning (i.e., of the question concerning the truth of beyng and/ or its resonance within beingness and its projecting) must be replaced by what alone remains admissible as an appropriate replacement: by a reckoning, and indeed by reckoning with "values." "Value" is the translation of the truth of essence into amount and the gigantic; the supreme power of the "thought of value" confirms that beings have been fully delivered over to accountability.
Conceived in a thoughtful manner, "communism" does not consist in the fact that each has to work equally much, earn an equal amount, consume an equal amount, and have equal pleasure, but rather in the fact that all modes of comportment and attitudes adopted by all are compelled in the same way by the unconditional power of an unnamed few. Decisionlessness (the breaking off of every possible growth of a decision and of every assuming of one) becomes the average air breathed by all. This common aspect, making each common to all, is as though it did not happen; that industry is nationalized, likewise the banks, that large-scale land holdings are dissolved, monasteries abolished, that every knowing is falsified into "intelligence" and the latter alone finds a "specialist" use and thereby "reality" within the domain of specialists;• that the manufacturing of a "public opinion" of the so-called "people" by press and radio is only out to maintain a fictitious construct that fundamentally no one takes seriously apart from those who have power, and that the latter too regard only as one means of power among others—all of this, from the perspective of the possessions and demeanor of the bourgeoisie hitherto, may appear as a real loss and destruction. However, this nationalization of "society" into the state signifies little, insofar as the state has become only a subordinate tool of the one and only party; the party itself, however, the tool of the Soviets, and the Soviets the forum of the few. It is characteristic of them that they remain unnamed, and the oft-named (Stalin and his publically active entourage) are in each instance tolerated only as the front men.
The "just-a-few" by no means refers to a small number by contrast with the countless many who are excluded from the possession of power. The "just-a-few" pursue their own manner of gathering every empowering of power into the sheer ruthlessness of unconditional
a. Trs.: Reinterpretation, elimination.