But why does history repeat itself first as tragedy then as farce?
We all know this quote, even if only the “first as tragedy, then as farce” extract of it:
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.
But I always thought that, if it was true, it was only by a kind of accident. Maybe I was just being thick, and this was obvious to everyone else, but It was hard to see why historical processes would generate such a pattern. It was, ironically, only by watching cosplay Marxists that I came to understand why history repeats itself in farces.
Here we see a man cosplaying as a 1930s Stalinist or 60’s Maoist:
It’s all there, the unprincipled alliances with the right, the pretense of a deeper scientific understanding (c.f. Lysenko) all of that rubbish. Only, it’s not all there. It has not one-millionth of the power of Stalin and Mao, and not just because it doesn’t have a regime to back it up, but because the world has changed.
History repeats “first as tragedy, then as farce” because people repeat old strategies that once worked (to a degree), but now hold no power. They think that reproducing the appearance of these old modes of action will guarantee the same results. The farce is because it’s a thing out of time, an anachronism. What were once effective strategies for conjuring and channeling social forces become empty rituals and patterns of gestures. In Marxist terms it's repetition of form without repetition of content.