THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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nevertheless the end of force in this kind of force is inescapably immanent. Whereas in bourgeois liberalism, which once so highly conspired and so deeply revealed
itself, it was always only the capitalist apparatus of force that was hidden and present. From the first, the worker in the capitalist class­state only had the freedom to
starve if he did not bow to the dictatorship of profit, and he would not have achieved either the right to strike or even the eight­hour day, the same rights which state
capitalism will take from him again, if he had not bloodily wrested them from the so­called Statue of Liberty through organization. Whereas the land of socialist
construction employed all its vast power to this end and must unerringly use it so that power over people comes to an end. So that instead of freedom of trade, with
which liberalism has lured and deceived, freedom from acquisition may arise. So that instead of the so­called state under the rule of law, which because of its rotten
class content has become wholly a state under the rule of illegality, no state at all is necessary any more. The order which is still possible in late capitalism, that of state
capitalism or fascism, consists solely of atrocities of order, and the freedom, with self­alienation that has become total, persists solely as a suppressed, if not missing
freedom. Again it is evident, more sharply than in the case of beneficence and pacifism, more terribly perverted: in the late bourgeoisie peace becomes war, order
barbarism, leisure emasculation and desolation. The high drama of fascism thus still hardly proves to be exhausted in its state­capitalist possibilities, although restricted in
them. The Soviet Union was the very troublesome contemporary of fascism at Stalingrad; a Soviet Union in inviting maturity will put an end to this state capitalism
everywhere.
Delusions of free time: toughening up for business
In the evening the oppressed man finally relaxes, becomes free as it were. He is allowed to recuperate, and he is allowed to do so because even a worker gets tired.
He receives free time after the trials and tribulations of the day, to feed and oil himself as a machine. The hours after work and Sunday mean: recuperation of working
power; man is never an end in the acquisitive society, always a means. Whatever is done with the hours after work, privately or in accordance with ancient custom,
merely embellishes the bourgeois end: reproduction of working power. All the more varied of course are the dreams which now settle in the hours after work of the
oppressed man. They would like to be fulfilled there, as in