The Problem of Tonnage

If you’ve read Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, you may recall “the problem of tonnage.” For those who haven’t, Koestler illuminates a great deal about our current predicament in a few crucial pages.

Published in 1940, Darkness at Noon was Koestler’s attempt to distill and analyze the essence of Soviet totalitarianism under Josef Stalin. Like other leftist intellectuals, Koestler was coming to grips with the barbarism and irrationality of the Soviet regime after having been a member of the Communist Party from 1931-38.

In the loosely fictionalized dictatorship portrayed by Koestler, there is an intra-Party debate regarding the construction of submarines. The question at first seems esoteric, but a great deal rides on the answer. Should the Party, now two decades out from seizing power, invest in big subs or little? 

Big subs, with their large tonnage and capacity for long range operations, would allow the Party to export their revolution to faraway places. That’s consistent with the Marxist-Leninist theory of Communism and the idea of a universal history.

Small subs, with reduced tonnage and range, are primarily defensive and, in that way, they represent a retreat from the original theory and aspirations of Communism. Building small subs to hug the coastline would mean accepting the limitations of the revolution and the uncertainty of global dominance, which could threaten the Party’s survival.

One of the Party’s elder statesmen, Bogrov, is executed for choosing incorrectly.

Bogrov advocates for large subs, because that’s the ideological orthodoxy on which he and other Party stalwarts cut their teeth. For Bogrov, serving the Party means upholding the Marxist-Leninist vision of world revolution. His embrace of large subs is strategically risky, but logically sound.

However, things have changed since Bogrov climbed the ranks. The Leader, “No. 1” in Koestler’s parlance, has decided that coastal defense and postponement of the revolution are now the official position of the Party. It’s a 180 degree pivot away from the Party’s historical position, and Old Guard fighters, like Bogrov, understand the new policy as both a mistake and a betrayal.

But here’s the thing…

The Party and the Leader can never be wrong. It doesn’t matter if their policies are incoherent or ideologically inconsistent. It doesn’t matter if their decision-making swerves wildly to and fro in ways that seem contradictory or self-defeating.

The crucial and unassailable point is that the Party and its godhead can never be mistaken, and their authority must never be challenged. Survival within the Party now means accepting every and any pronouncement from the Leader, no matter how daft, dark, or confounding. The Party’s ideological and moral bankruptcy is beside the point.

All that matters under these conditions is the power of the Party and its Leader to impose their will. Those who resist or fail to perform the requisite choreography are broken on the wheel of power, which the Party continues to call the wheel of history. Witnesses to the carnage, in most cases, quickly learn to parrot the Party; others fall mute.

We urgently need a conversation about the means and meaning of resistance under these conditions. This is not an intellectual exercise or a hypothetical scenario. 

Here in 2025, the supposed Party of small government is aggressively recruiting to fill the ranks of a partisan paramilitary. The professed Party of states’ rights is deploying National Guard troops to states and other jurisdictions where they’re not wanted or needed. The self-proclaimed Party of free speech is sending its agents into museums and other cultural institutions to make sure that all intellectual inquiry is brought to the heel of power. Inside the MAGA clique, it’s Opposite Day, and more and more functionaries seem willing to contort themselves into whatever grotesque shape No. 1 demands.

Throughout the U.S., opponents of the regime took to the streets on September 1 to support the ”Workers Over Billionaires” movement. These demonstrations are important for cultivating engaged citizenship, fostering broad solidarity, and incentivizing political leadership. It may be, though, that other tactics will be necessary if we want to stem the tide of authoritarianism and salvage what’s left of our democracy. Labor stoppages, sit-ins, teach-ins, tax resistance, and other forms of civil disobedience–we ought to consider everything in the toolkit of non-violent resistance. We can wait, we can organize, we can crowd test our messages, and phone our elected officials; but outside, the shadows are lengthening.  

The problem of tonnage, which tripped up Bogrov, isn’t only a relic of Soviet history. It’s a recurrent problem which manifests in a collapse of reason and logical consistency. It’s a kind of mass intoxication that depends, first of all, on small, private capitulations. The strength of the group substitutes for the weakness of the individual, and No. 1 becomes a replacement for the methods of knowledge we have depended on to dissolve darkness into light.