Kalopia

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THE SECOND CONGRESS AND THE QUESTION OF REVOLUTION

Dýnamis Confronts Its Own Transformation

As the party gathers for its Second Congress of the Movement, three visions of Ordered Dynamism contend for its soul, and the one man whose judgement might settle the contest has, thus far, declined to give it.

Helios, July 5733. The Second Congress has opened in Helios, two years now since the founding of the party in the summer of 5731, and it is a larger thing than the first by far. The Action Groups have swollen, the polling has hardened, and the movement draws today from quarters it could not have dreamt of claiming two years past: young men who came to it through the gyms, older women who came through the reading circles and the patient social work that grew up around them, and no small number of former socialists who came through its quarrel with inherited privilege. At its founding the party was a movement of physical culture and ideological promise, and little more. What it must now resolve, and resolve under the eyes of the whole assembled movement, is what it intends to make of both at once, of the inheritance handed down by Demetrios, and of the political momentum that has gathered, in these two years, around Nikandros and his reading of that inheritance.

The Congress will form its committees, as such bodies do, on national service, on popular justice, on biological and medical integrity, on family formation, on economic sovereignty, and on the further expansion of the Action Groups. It will hear amendments to the programme and resolutions touching the place of direct action within the movement's strategy. Yet beneath the whole apparatus of agenda and committee there runs a question no podium can answer and no resolution can close, namely, what Ordered Dynamism is in truth, and what, invoking its name, the movement may now permit itself to demand.

THE INHERITANCE: FROM DEMETRIOS TO NIKANDROS

Herakles Demetrios, painter, sculptor, novelist, the Κτίστης whom the movement reveres as its Founder, never set down a political programme, nor sought to. His doctrine was a personal one, concerned wholly with the remaking of the individual through discipline, through physical cultivation, through beauty, and through the deliberate refusal of what he named drift. Passivity, ugliness, irony, comfort, the squandering of youth, the slow and unprotesting swallowing of defeat, these were the enemies he set himself against, and against them he raised up the ascent, the taking-on of form, the refusal of the ordinary. The first work is the self. That sentence became the whole heart of the early movement. The Action Groups he raised in 5681 were gyms and social clubs both, places where the body was held to be the first visible proof of the will, and where reading and painting and exercise were understood not as three pursuits but as a single labour of becoming.

What Demetrios did not ask, and perhaps could not, was why so many were never given the chance to begin that labour at all.
It was Nikandros who took up the question. From 5718 onward, writing through the Demetrios Institution, he issued the essays that would in time recast the whole movement, The Ordered Self, Formation and Rank, Against Private Vanity, The Second Work. The argument of them was that the older doctrine had come to its limit. Self-formation pursued for its own sake, he wrote, decays at last into private vanity, into the cultivation of a beautiful self within a broken world, indifferent to whatever it is that holds all others in their formlessness. And so he named a second work to follow upon the first: the clearing-away of every social force that prevents the self from being formed at all. Inherited wealth, credentialism, patronage, the quiet gatekeeping of the institutions, all of these he held to be anti-formative, the very machinery of drift, imposed from above upon those set below.

This was the door that Nikandros opened. It is a door through which, since, a great many very different men have passed.


THE FIRST TENDENCY: MAVROS AND THE ORGANIZATIONAL RADICALS

Ajax Mavros came to Dýnamis through the Action Groups, through combat sport and physique competition, through long years of building himself up and losing it and building it again. A three-time Demetriad, he reads Ordered Dynamism less for what it states than for what it requires of a man, and what it requires, to his mind, is action, and action without delay.

As Political Secretary and master of the Organizational Bureau, the most formidable of the Secretariats, Mavros holds in his hands the whole field apparatus of the movement, the chain of command that descends from the Central Directorate through the Regional Action Groups to the smallest of the local clubs. Of late he has argued, and with a directness that grows month by month, that the Action Groups can no longer content themselves with being gyms and reading circles merely. They must become instruments of pressure, fit to act in the streets and in the workplaces, in all those rooms into which no parliament has ever set foot. Addressing the Regional Action Group chairs this past month, he returned to the dialectical cadence he had favoured at the founding Congress, the cadence that named the Action Group an engine of formation, an engine of change, and an engine of dynamism:

"The Action Group is not, by its nature, comfortable. It is uncomfortable. And what is uncomfortable in the gym must become uncomfortable in the street, in the office, in the ministry. The state we have inherited is a structure built to preserve an undeserving and accidental elite against the forming, against the very concept of self-struggle and ascent. Challenge is the dialectic by which the person achieves ascent; it is also the dialectic by which the nation achieves it. So we challenge the barrier, and when it stands again, we challenge it again. There is no last barrier, because there is no last man."

He does not, let it be clear, counsel his members merely to train the harder. He counsels them that whatsoever stands between one man and the formation of another must be torn down, and torn down by the collective whole, for to reach the fullness of a life, the greatness of which he holds every man born to be capable, demands action, and at times action for its own sake. He grounds the whole of it, as is his habit, in Demetrios, indeed in the very essay he quoted while bestowing the Demetriad at the founding Congress, You Could Be Brilliant. But You Are a Coward.:

"Pessimism is paralysis. It is not clear sight, but the failure of courage, only thinly masked by intelligence. The men who tell us the barrier cannot be moved have simply mistaken the limits of their own spirit for the limits of the world."

The struggle, as Mavros understands it, does not cease when a barrier falls. It goes on, for the self goes on, and society goes on, and ascent, being what it is, admits of no ceiling. What he offers the recruits arriving now from the socialist left of Kalopia is a condition of permanent forward motion, spontaneous, collective, and forever unfinished.

THE SECOND TENDENCY: LEONTIOS AND THE LONG MARCH

Where Mavros speaks of the street, Diomedes Leontios speaks of the institution. As Secretary-General he keeps the administrative machinery of the Central Council, and where Mavros would tear the barrier to the ground, Leontios would rather outlast it, hollow it out, and fill it again from within with the cadres of the movement itself. He has given the scheme a name, and the name is the Long March.

It is a name aimed, deliberately, at both wings of the quarrel at once. Against the Social Dynamists of Berisha it holds that parliamentary patience is not enough, that a movement may win its elections and pass its laws and leave the deep structure of Kalopian society precisely where it found it. Against the radicals of Mavros it holds that spontaneous action, lacking the capture of institutions, is no more than energy spent for nothing. The Action Groups, as Leontios conceives them, are neither clubs nor instruments of the street, but the very embryo of a new Kalopian civilisation, disciplined cadres who pass into the schools and the civil service, the courts, the professions, the cultural institutions, and there remake them from within, not by the storming of them but by the becoming of them. He set it before the cadre school at North Helios in his own slow and architectural manner:

"A movement which waits for permission to form the nation has already accepted the authority of decay. But a movement which burns the nation down has nothing left to form. We do not storm the institutions of Kalopia. We become them, quietly, completely, until one morning the country wakes and finds that the formed are already inside, already holding the desks, already issuing the orders. The march is slow. The march has a destination."

At the Congress, Leontios and Mavros are looked to stand together against the parliamentary line of Berisha. Yet what each desires beyond that alliance is by no means the same thing. Mavros sees motion without an end. Leontios sees a march that arrives.

THE THIRD TENDENCY: BERISHA AND SOCIAL DYNAMISM

Arben Berisha has been the foremost of the internal critics of the course on which Mavros and Leontios would set the party. His essay made its way among the Congress delegates in the weeks before the summer meeting, and it is already being read aloud in the Action Group reading circles the length of Kalopia. It is an argument raised against a particular radicalism, one which Berisha holds to misread Demetrios, and to mistake altogether what Ordered Dynamism is in truth demanding.

He begins from the same inheritance as the rest. He grants that the conditions of formation are no small matter, that no man pulls himself upward by will alone when the whole of the world about him is built to hold him down. He accepts the second work of Nikandros. What he will not accept is the leap that follows it, the leap that would make of the democratic republic an enemy:

"The people cannot be formed by contempt for the means through which the people speak. We are a movement of ascent. Ascent requires ground to stand on, and that ground is the democratic republic, imperfect, corrupted, insufficient as it is. Is our own life not imperfect? It is in imperfection, as Demetrios taught, that the very act of self-struggle and ascent is to be found."

It is here that Berisha takes up the strangest weapon in the whole of the canon, the obscure late novel of Demetrios, I Know He Is My Father. It is a work scarcely cited in the official literature of the party. The early clubs preferred his writing on physical culture and on ascent, and the later party preferred whatever might be bound neatly to formation and to collective purpose. Berisha has made of it, quietly, the very centre of his case. The novel attends a man caring for a father lost to dementia, a body that has slipped its discipline wholly, incontinent, wandering, no longer able even to know its own son. The line that endures from it is the husband's:
"He does not know that I am his son. I know that he is my father."

This Berisha turns directly upon the radicals. "Demetrios, at the end, did not write of the formed and self-commanding body," he told a regional committee. "He wrote of a body that fails, and of the son who remains bound to it when duty has become ugly. That is the formed man. Not the one who breaks the barrier and marches on, but the one who stays. Any member of our movement that recognises only strength has not read our Founder to his end."

On the socialists now entering the party, Berisha is more careful than his critics had looked for him to be. He does not wish them shut out. Indeed he grants that a great many of them come already formed, possessed of real discipline, real solidarity, the settled habits of an organised life. What he dreads is the theory of change they might carry in together with that energy:

"Dynamism is not revolutionary communism. We do not believe a formed minority can seize the state on behalf of an unformed majority. We are not state revolutionaries; the revolution we mean is the one that happens within the person. The majority must be formed first. That takes patience. It takes faith in the nation and above all faith in the people to engage in self government. Demetrios did not storm anything, he built, he persuaded, he made the Delta visible in the lives of ordinary people until they could not imagine life without it. Let us become beacons for others to follow, and not the foot soldiers of a revolution."

THE CONGRESS AND THE SILENCE OF NIKANDROS

Dýnamis does not recognise organised factions. Its internal discipline is strict, and no tendency is suffered to raise itself into a party within the party. The tendencies are there, for all that.

The Second Congress will resolve none of this in the open. The Congress of the Movement is, among other things, a ritual of unity, a staging-forth of that disciplined collective which Ordered Dynamism professes to be building.

Yet the argument will outlive the week of it. And the man whose answer would weigh heaviest has, even now, withheld it. Hektor Nikandros, the chief ideological founder of the movement, holds himself above the tendencies. He will address the Congress as its senior figure, and will confirm the general line of Ordered Dynamism, and in this there is no surprise. This is the same Nikandros who gives no quarter whatever in the legislative chamber, who names his opponents' half-measures the cowardice of the old politics, who likens a foreign minority stake to the first breach in the hull of a ship, who answers compromise with a flat and contemptuous BAH. And yet, upon the one question that is splitting his own movement, he has said nothing. Nothing of direct action, nothing of parliamentary strategy, nothing of the socialist current even now arriving at the doors. His writings hold passages that each of the three may claim for its own, and each of the three, in its turn, reads his silence with the closest attention.

The Delta points upward. Upon that much the three are agreed. It is on how fast, and by what means, and through whom, that they part.

Faster toward progress. Upward to ascent.

Helios, July 5733