Mu
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
"The world is changing rapidly before our eyes"
As 2012 dawns: Once more on optimism and pessimism
Exactly twelve months ago, in an article entitled: 2011: - Optimism or pessimism? I wrote the following: "The first effect of the crisis was one of shock, not only for the bourgeois but also for the workers. There was a tendency to cling to jobs and accept cuts in the short term, especially as the union leaders offer no alternative. But this will be replaced by a general mood of anger and bitterness, which will sooner or later begin to affect the mass organisations of the working class."
These predictions were translated into reality far more quickly than I had any right to expect. The world is changing rapidly before our eyes. Over the last 12 months events have been unfolding with breathtaking speed.
It is difficult to imagine that one year ago Ben Ali, Mubarak and Gaddafi were apparently firmly in power. Berlusconi, Papandreou and Zapatero were still at the head of their respective countries. Nobody had heard of the indignados or the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Nobody talked of the imminent demise of the euro.
How things have changed! As the New Year dawns, the ruling class is gripped by a growing sense of pessimism, bordering on panic. All the attempts to breathe new life into a languishing world economy have failed. The injection of trillions of dollars into the banks has only served to transform a black hole in the heart of the world financial system into a black hole in the public finances of Europe and the USA.
No way out
The capitalists can see no way out of the present crisis. Their only policy is to cut, cut and cut again, seeking to destroy all the conquests made by the working class over the past 50 years. If they succeed, it would mean pushing society back to the kind of conditions experienced by the workers in the days of Marx and Charles Dickens – the kind of conditions the Chinese workers are suffering at the present time.
Such a policy will not solve the crisis but, on the contrary, will only make it ever deeper. By slashing wages and pensions, they will reduce demand still further, and so aggravate the crisis of overproduction, which manifests itself as excess capacity on a global scale.
In a confused fashion this is understood by the Keynesians who advocate measures to reactivate the economy by boosting demand. The same song is sung by the reformists of all shades, from the Social Democrats to the ex-Stalinists who have abandoned all pretence of allegiance to communism and seek solutions within the bounds of capitalism. These people do not like the present capitalism. They want to replace it, not with socialism (they no longer even mention the word) but a different capitalism, a nicer capitalism, a gentler, more humane capitalism – capitalism with a human face. This is what they call "realism". It resembles a desperate attempt to square the circle, or teach a man-eating tiger to eat salads.
They believe that it is merely a question of stimulating demand. But how it is possible to boost demand? Maybe by reducing interest rates? But interest rates are close to zero already. Or by boosting state expenditure? But the main problem facing Europe and the USA is precisely how to eliminate the huge mountain of public debt left over from the banking crisis of 2008. How can governments that are bankrupt boost state expenditure? Despite all their best efforts, the alchemists never succeeded in transforming base metal into gold. And, as the ancients used to say, "ex nihilo, nihil fit" – nothing comes from nothing.
The only possible solution to this conundrum is what they call "quantitative easing", that is, that the state should print large amounts of money to plug the yawning gap in the public finances. This is a desperate measure that would inevitably lead to an explosion of inflation and a new and even deeper collapse later on. Compared to the voodoo economics of the Keynesians, the hocus-pocus of the old alchemists was a brilliant exercise in logic.
The picture could scarcely be more desolate. On 31st December the Financial Times, the most prestigious organ of the British capitalist class, summoned up the courage to publish an editorial with the encouraging title: Finding reasons to be cheerful – after all who wants to be miserable on New Year's Eve? What is significant is that reasons to be cheerful must be searched for in the first place. In any case, the readers of the FT will have found very little cheer in an article that begins with these words:
"Will anybody mourn the passing of 2011? This has been a year of non-stop crisis and deepening economic gloom. From the tsunami that sparked the nuclear catastrophe of Fukushima, to the paralysis of European leaders as investors' faith in the euro began to founder, there is little reason to ring out the year with any sense of regret.
"Next year looks little better with the prospect of recession looming over large parts of Europe, while even the economic powerhouses of Asia are beginning to feel the pressure. Far from welcoming 2012, many of us will be reluctant to celebrate a new year that promises even more austerity and uncertainty."
Whatever crumbs of comfort the FT could think of in its editorial were immediately contradicted by the front page headline of the same edition, which informs us that $6.3 trillion were wiped off markets in 2011. Sharp falls in the world's stock markets indicate that the capitalists, who had no cause to celebrate the year 2011, will have even less to celebrate the advent of 2012.
The bosses moan about their falling profits and sliding shares. But in the midst of the crisis, the super rich remain super rich. The same bankers who presided over the ruin of the world's financial system are rewarding themselves hundreds of millions in bonuses. Nobody is called to account. Nobody goes to gaol. The money keeps pouring in. The champagne still flows.
For the poor and unemployed, by contrast the crisis of capitalism signifies a nightmare of poverty and humiliation, homelessness and despair. For millions of families in the USA there is no cause for New Year celebration.
The masses move into action
But every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Everywhere the masses are beginning to move into action. The most striking manifestation of the changed situation is the emergence of a worldwide protest movement that is rejecting capitalism. A growing number of people are reacting against the existing order: the unemployment that condemns millions to enforced inactivity; the endless wars, racism and injustice: and above all, the gross inequality, which concentrates obscene wealth in the hands of the 1% who rule society, while condemning the vast majority of the world's population to a life of increasing impoverishment, misery and degradation.
The most significant feature of this worldwide movement is the similarities both in causes and aims. This has been realised by the most perceptive representatives of the bourgeoisie. Thus, Gideon Rachman writes:
"For all the patent differences in levels of wealth and freedom between Europe and the Arab world, it was difficult not to see some parallel between Europe and the Arab world, it was difficult not to see some parallel between the crowds of angry, young unemployed people in North Africa and southern Europe. The indignados - who occupied central Madrid in May to protest against a youth unemployment level of 40 per cent in Spain - made the connection explicit by rather vaingloriously claiming the mantle of Tahrir Square.
"After riots in London and popular protests against inequality and corruption in countries as diverse as Chile, China, Israel and India, I wrote a column at the en of August, headlined - '2011, the year of global indignation.' At the time, I speculated that the US might prove immune to the wave of social protest spreading around the world. But that idea was quickly proved wrong. By September, the Occupy Wall Street movement had got going." (FT, 30/12/11)
The movements that are unfolding display many of the features of a revolutionary or prerevolutionary situation. That is true not only of Egypt and Greece but of the United States of America. "In the face of popular fury, political invective and protest movements on their doorsteps, the rich are fighting back in the new bout of US class warfare", we are informed by the FT (22/12/11).
Of course, we are speaking here only of the very early stages of the revolution – that stage when the mass of people who hitherto took little or no interest in politics now find themselves on the streets protesting and demonstrating against a social and political order that has become intolerable.
It is easy to point out the deficiencies of the movement: its unorganized, spontaneous and chaotic character, the lack of clear objectives and programmes. But such deficiencies are characteristic features of the early stages of every revolution in history.
The school of revolution
The masses everywhere and at all times do not learn from books but only from their direct experience. Great events are needed to shake the masses out of their customary apathy and political indifference. The revolution is their school, where they learn some very painful lessons. But in a revolutionary situation they learn more in a single day of action than in twenty years of "normal" existence. Who can doubt that the workers and youth of Egypt learnt more in a few weeks of struggle than in all the previous decades of their lives?
One can, of course, object that none of the basic objectives of the Egyptian Revolution have as yet been achieved. Cynics will say: "You see! The old order has merely changed its form of rule, while all the old corrupt elements remain in power. The military holds power and is crushing the revolution under its jackboot." Such is the "wisdom" of the Pharisees, who can see no further than the end of their nose and the sceptics who see only the backside of history, never its face.
All revolutions pass through definite stages, following a pattern that reproduces itself in the most variegated circumstances with the most astonishing regularity. Above and beyond the individual events, Marxism enables us to see the process as a whole –with all its inevitable contradictions, cross-currents and incessant ebbs and flows.
The initial stage is always the same: a phase of euphoria in which the mass movement seems to sweep everything before it. For those who live through it, this is an intoxicating experience. It is as though suddenly everything is possible. Victory seems inevitable, defeat unthinkable. It is the stage of democratic illusions.
In 1917 in Russia this phase was represented by the February Revolution, when the workers and soldiers overthrew the Tsar and set up the Soviets. But despite the euphoria of the masses, the February Revolution solved nothing fundamental. After the fall of the Romanovs, the landlords and capitalists, the bankers and generals, regrouped behind the protective facade of the Provisional Government. They ruled by "democratic" means, while simultaneously preparing the counterrevolution.
The Bolshevik Party under Lenin and Trotsky remained a minority in the Soviets, which were dominated by the reformist leaders of the SRs and Mensheviks who backed the Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks demanded the transfer of power to the Soviets, but the reformists clung to the bourgeoisie.
As a result, the pendulum swung sharply to the right. Lenin had to flee to Finland. Pravda's printing presses were smashed by reactionary mobs. Trotsky and other Bolshevik leaders were imprisoned. The result was the attempted coup of General Kornilov, which was defeated by the action of the masses.
This prepared a new swing to the left, in which the Bolsheviks won the decisive majority in the Soviets, preparing the way for the transference of power to the Soviets in October (7 November in the modern calendar). We see a similar pattern in the Spanish Revolution of 1931-37, and also in the French Revolution of 1789-93.
The overthrow of Mubarak was a huge step forward. It showed the immense power of the masses. But, like the February Revolution in Russia, it did not solve any of the fundamental problems of the masses. And it is not possible to solve problems like unemployment, homelessness and poverty as long as the land, the banks and big industries remain in the hands of a privileged minority.
Even the promise of democracy will remain an empty phrase under capitalism. The propertied classes are regrouping behind the army officers, who themselves own a great part of the Egyptian economy and have a vested interest in resisting change. The masses have understood this and are acting accordingly. The youth are naturally in the front line of the revolutionary struggle. Borzou Daraghi writes:
"Asked again and again what they would do if someone tried to hijack their revolution, young Egyptians, Tunisians and Libyans have given the same answer: stage another revolution. Few have suggested forming or joining a political party to represent their interests.
"'We are the ones who made the revolution,' said Siraj Moasser, a 26-year-old Libyan. 'If the revolution goes awry, we will make another one. We have nothing else to lose'."
And again:
"'We hope the freedom and justice, and for the shabab [working-class youth] to finally find jobs,' says Mohammad Medhad, a 21-year-old unemployed Cairo man who was among the Tahrir Square protesters in January and again last month. 'The youth are the ones who should be in charge because they made the revolution'." (Financial Times, 30/12/11)
This is the authentic voice of the revolutionary masses and the youth.
The weakest link
Last January I wrote:
"Those sceptics who moan about the alleged 'low level of consciousness' of the masses merely show that their knowledge of Marxism consists only of undigested scraps. Their pedantic approach to the class struggle is a toxic mixture of ignorance and intellectual snobbery. All the impotent jeremiads of the sceptics will be confounded on the basis of the titanic events that are being prepared. Unlike the eunuchs, the masses can only learn through struggle. There will, of course, be many defeats, mistakes and setbacks, but through all these experiences, the movement will learn and grow. There is no other way.
"Step by step, the disintegration of capitalism is preparing the way for revolutionary developments. The road to great social transformations is prepared by a whole series of partial struggles. This is the necessary preparatory stage in which we find ourselves."
Twelve months later I have no need to change a single comma of what I wrote then. The preparatory stage of the worldwide revolutionary struggle for socialism will inevitably be long drawn out because of the weakness of the subjective factor: the revolutionary party and leadership. This will have to be built in the fire of events.
The real significance of the Arab Revolution is this: that capitalism has begun to break at its weakest link. The crisis in the Arab world is far deeper and more explosive than the crisis in Europe or the United States. But at bottom it is the same crisis. This is recognized by at least some of the strategists of Capital, like Andreas Whittam Smith,a financial journalist and founder of the Independent.
On 20 October 2011 Whittam Smith wrote a piece with the title: Western nations are now ripe for revolution. In this article he points out that at the beginning of 1848 no one believed that revolution was imminent. Naturally! Hypnotised by superficial phenomena, the so-called experts of the bourgeoisie are blind to the processes at work in the deepest recesses of society. Above all, they are organically incapable of understanding the real moods of anger and frustration that are developing in the masses. Therefore, they are always taken by surprise by revolutions.
The inability of the bourgeois to understand revolution was starkly exposed by the Arab Revolution. As late as January 6, 2011, The Economist wrote: "Tunisia's troubles are unlikely to unseat the 74 year-old president or even to jolt his model of autarchy." A few weeks later Ben Ali had been overthrown and his regime was in ruins.
On January 25, 2011 Hilary Clinton stated: "Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people." This was when the masses had already come out onto the streets of Cairo.
The same lack of awareness was shown by other bourgeois commentators, such as the BBC correspondent in Cairo who wrote on January 17 that no revolt would happen in Egypt because people there are apathetic: "Unlike Tunisia, the population has a much lower level of education. Illiteracy is high, internet penetration is low."
The article, signed by Jon Leyne in Cairo was entitled: "No sign Egypt will take the Tunisian road." To make matters worse, these lines were also included in his report of the events on January 25, the mass demonstration which marked the beginning of the revolution. That was the full extent of the wisdom of the bourgeois experts who even less than twelve months ago denied the very possibility of the Arab Revolution.
Of course, it is clear that the Revolution is not finished and must still run through a whole series of stages, the precise course of which it is impossible to predict. There are too many variable factors both nationally and internationally to perform such a task. All that is possible is to predict the general line of development and indicate the different possibilities inherent in the situation. However, the main thing is to see that the revolution has begun and will continue to unfold through a whole series of stages before it reaches its final denouement.
The fight for a new world
The events that are shaking the Arab world to its foundations are just one manifestation of the general crisis of world capitalism. Not one of the problems faced by the peoples can be solved in the narrow confines of the capitalist system. That is the root cause of the revolutionary explosions in North Africa and the Middle East. That is why the Arab Revolution cannot stop until it has tackled the root problem which is private ownership of the means of production and the nation state, which are too narrow to contain the colossal potential of the productive forces.
The new movements are an expression of the deep crisis of the capitalist system. On the other hand, these movements themselves have not understood the seriousness of the situation. For all their energy and élan, these movements have limitations that will quickly be exposed. The occupation of squares and parks, though it can be a potent statement, ultimately leads nowhere. More radical measures are necessary to bring about a root-and-branch transformation of society.
Unless the movement is taken to a higher level, at a certain stage, it will subside, leaving the people disappointed and demoralized. Upon reflection of their experience, an increasing number of activists will come to see the need for a consistent revolutionary programme. It is the contention of this writer that this can only be provided by Marxism.
The road we have entered will not be an easy one. There will be many ups and downs. There will be defeats as well as victories. But one thing is clear. The capitalist system has entered into a phase of terminal and irreversible decline. It has nothing to offer humanity except a future of convulsions, chaos, crises and wars. Its continuation threatens the very foundations of civilization and culture, and in the long run even places a question mark over the future of life on earth.
It is easy to be discouraged by the horrors that surround us on all sides: the starving millions, the mass unemployment, the constant wars and upheavals, the inevitable defeats and setbacks. Sentimental moralists and tearful pacifists may shake their heads at this monstrous spectacle. They see only the surface manifestations but are ignorant of the deeper causes. But what is needed is not plaintive moans and sighs about "man's inhumanity to man" but a scientific diagnosis and proposals for a remedy.
History is not just a senseless catalogue of disasters and crimes. Careful observation will reveal definite patterns that constantly repeat themselves. The period we are now living through has many similarities to the period of the decline of the Roman Empire, which reflected the impasse of an outmoded system of production – slavery. This long decline was drawn out for several centuries. There were periods of apparent revival, which were only the prelude to new and even steeper falls.
The stagnation of the productive forces led to a general crisis of confidence, beginning with the ruling class itself. In the period of its decline there was a general feeling of pessimism in Roman society, reflected in irrational tendencies in philosophy and religion. Almost nobody believed in the old Gods. Instead there was an epidemic of mystical sects from the Orient. The same all pervasive smell of decay – economic, social, moral and intellectual – everywhere clings to capitalist society today.
Reactionaries blame the youth for their lack of belief. But what is there for young people to believe in? There was a time when the Socialist and Communist Parties held out the perspective of a fundamental change in society. It is one of the central contradictions of the period that the leaders of the parties and organizations set up by the working class to change society have become monstrous obstacles in the path of change.
Nevertheless, the working class is a thousand times more powerful than the most powerful bureaucratic apparatuses. The events of the last twelve months are a devastating answer to all the cynics and sceptics. They provide an irrefutable proof that nothing can destroy the will of the masses to change society.
The rulers of society – like the elite of the Roman Empire – are struggling to strangle this new world at birth. They are not willing to surrender power, or cede a single particle of their wealth and privileges. They will not give up without a ferocious fight. They must be overthrown by the conscious movement of the working class – those modern slaves who produce all the wealth of society and who alone are capable of reconstructing a new social order from the ruins of the old. What is plain from the inspiring events in Tunisia and Egypt is that once the masses are mobilised to change society, no force on earth can halt them.
The worldwide revolutionary movement has begun. It will experience many vicissitudes, defeats and setbacks. But through all these experiences the advanced workers and youth will learn and draw conclusions. Marxists place all our faith in the workers and youth of Egypt, Tunisia, Greece, Spain, the United States... Our role is not to preach from the sidelines but to engage in the struggle. Our place is by their side, participating in each and every struggle, while explaining that the only real solution is the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by a society fit for human beings to live in – socialism.
We understand that all the horrors we see around us are the painful travails of a new world that is struggling to be born. Temporary defeats will not deter us from our course. Capitalist society is rotten to the very marrow. It is sick unto death. It cannot be saved, and all the attempts to prolong its existence merely prolong its death agony, provoking new horrors for humanity: new outbursts of violence, wars, terrorism and death for millions of people. The capitalist system must die in order that humanity may live.
Somebody once told Durruti – the courageous Spanish anarchist who through his own experience came close to Bolshevism – "even if you win you will be sitting on a pile of ruins". To this Durruti delivered a characteristically revolutionary answer: "We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a while. For, you must not forget, we also know how to build. It is we the workers who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and in America, and everywhere.
"We, the workers, can build others to take their place, and better ones! We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world, here, in our hearts. That world is growing this minute".
London, 3rd January, 2012
Party for Socialism and Liberation: U.S. Marxism-Leninism a dead end
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwJBMxrhf7s
Just like Howard Zinn, and all of the middle class radical material published by Haymarket Books, this "History of Working Class Struggle in the United States" touches on the Wobblies, Eugene Debs, and NOT the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, or anything post 1920.
Wow. Just wow.
This trend among bourgeois left and social democratic historians to downplay the 1930s because the leaders were "confused by Stalinism" has often disturbed me. Frances Piven does it. Howard Zinn did it. Noam Chomsky does it.
Now, PSL has joined in.
Why not just drop the pretense of Leninism as an ideology?
According to this 20 minute screed, "Marxist-Leninists" never did anything worth mentioning.
The common and age-old narrative of "Socialism in the U.S. was great till Leninism came along" is left unchallenged.
The word "CIO" is missing from this speech. The words "unemployed councils" are as well. Even his mention of the issue of self-determination makes no reference to historic importance in the Black struggle played by the Communist Party.
This speech is an embarrassment to "Marxist-Leninists." I wonder if PSL does any internal education whatsoever on the history of Marxism-Leninism in the U.S., or just lets their youth get it from Anarcho-Social-Democrat college professors, who are so rampant on Universities.
Disgusting.
Sunday, January 1, 2012
What could a Marxist do with Descartes?
Reasonable ideology? Negri's Descartes
Dan Swain
Antonio Negri, Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology and the Bourgeois Project (Verso 2007), £6.99
In the postface to this work Antonio Negri recalls the confusion and incredulity with which it was met on first publication: ‘What could a Marxist do with Descartes?’, ‘Why is Negri wasting his time on Descartes?’ (p317). Exactly the same questions come to mind upon the decision to publish it in English in 2007 as part of Verso’s Radical Thinkers series. What can we, as Marxists in the 21st century, learn from an examination of a 17th century thinker? Negri is less than clear on this in the main body of the work, but it is clear from his postface that he considers Descartes’ thought to be of particular significance for two key reasons. First, it demonstrates the connection between philosophical theories and politics. Second, significant parallels can be drawn between Descartes’ position and our own. For Negri ‘the present and the era in which Descartes’ work was conceived resemble one another’ (p320).
Negri traces the development of Descartes’ thought in painstaking and often baffling detail. He identifies in Descartes’ early work a renaissance optimism that is distinctly lacking in his later writings. The Descartes who arrived on the intellectual scene in the 1610s is portrayed as one very heavily influenced by renaissance notions of science and a belief in our ability to understand and control the world. Descartes’ early optimism was a reflection of the early optimism of the bourgeois project—of the striving of a new class to free itself from the fetters of the old order, and to remake the world in its own image. Negri writes that Descartes was part of ‘the offensive vanguard of the bourgeoisie…the social group that emerged from the first wave of mercantile and capitalist development of the 1400s and 1500s which, in the 16th century, consolidated its power through the parliaments and the law courts’ (p93). His early thought was strongly tied to his class position, and the fortunes of that class.
However, by the time of his later, most famous publications in the 1630s and 1640s much of this had changed. In these works he was preoccupied with the difficulty we face in knowing anything, because we might be dreaming, or deceived by a demon. All that we can know is that we ourselves exist. This existence, however, is merely the existence of a thinking being, of thought. For Descartes our senses are unreliable—the only way we can come to knowledge is through thought. Descartes did not deny the existence of an external world, but he claimed it is not knowable in the way thought is. Since knowledge is confined to thought, science becomes the study of ideas, rather than a project of understanding and potentially changing the physical world.
Negri argues that, in establishing this self-imposed limit to the extent he can grasp and shape the world, Descartes was creating an ideology for his class, to help it move through a period of crisis. Negri argues that the change in Descartes was the result of the experiences of his class in the 1620s, a decade marked by economic crisis. This was a time when the previously smooth and seemingly relentless development of mercantile capitalism stalled, and the newly formed bourgeoisie was thrown into doubt, when ‘the bourgeoisie must step back and abandon the demand for power over society as a whole’ (p116). Descartes’ later philosophy was a ‘reasonable ideology’, a philosophy that allowed the bourgeois class to cope with this period of stagnation, consolidation and regrouping: ‘It was a question for him, on the one hand, of confirming…the nascent power of the bourgeoisie, the revolutionary potential of its action… But on the other hand it was a question of bending the absoluteness of the original position to the concreteness of a historically sustainable political project’ (p322).
Negri’s account is presented in impressive and often overwhelming detail. What it demonstrates most clearly is the important connection between philosophy and politics. Descartes’ metaphysics is presented as entailing a specific notion of politics and social change. It both articulated the aspirations of a class at a particular time and fixed the boundaries of what was politically possible. Alex Callinicos has recently made a similar point about the importance of philosophy to politics. In The Resources of Critique Callinicos studies a range of theorists, including Negri, observing that the wrong philosophical theory can severely limit our political ability to criticise, and therefore change, the present. Seen in this light, Negri’s claims are interesting and significant, even though the connections between certain aspects of Descartes’ philosophy and the bourgeois project could have been better spelt out.
What about Negri’s other central claim, that there are analogies to be drawn between the present day and the early 17th century? Here, I think, he is on weaker ground. Negri claims that the position of the revolutionary subject—the subjective force capable of changing society—today is analogous to the position of the bourgeoisie during Descartes’ lifetime. It is unclear how significant the parallels are, even leaving aside the fact that the revolutionary subject Negri has in mind is not the working class but his own concept of the ‘multitude’. Negri is right that in the current era the spread of global capitalism and neoliberalism is an indication of the ruling class on the offensive, just as the old feudal lords were in Descartes’ time. Yet Negri also claims that we are in ‘an interregnum between the old forms of capitalist government and the new ones of a global governance’ (p320). However, recent years have shown that many of the old forms persist.
We remain in a world dominated by major corporations tied to nation states; global institutions, far from becoming a new form of power, are consistently undermined. Furthermore, while Descartes’ bourgeoisie was a class that could not take power, surely the working class today is more than capable of doing so. What is appropriate for them is not a ‘reasonable ideology’, designed to sustain them through a period of defeat, but a revolutionary ideology.
Descartes
The Tri-centennial of the Discourse on Method
Georges Politzer
Source: Originally in La Correspondance internationale, no. 23, 1937. In Ecrits 1: La Philosophie et les Mythes, edited by Jacques Debouzy, Éditions Sociales, Paris, 1969;
Translated : for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor
In the month of June of this year [1937], exactly three hundred years ago, The Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences by Rene Descartes came out for the first time, without an author’s name.
The French Communist Party has made a particular effort to see to it that the celebration of this anniversary goes beyond the framework of an academic commemoration.
In the name of the Communist parliamentary group, our comrades Cogniot and Berlioz have registered a proposition inviting the government to take all the needed steps to organize the “National Celebration of the Tri-centennial of the Discourse on Method of René Descartes.” The Party press is making known to the working class and the popular masses of France the work of Descartes.
Our Party has thus taken the lead in the celebrations of the tri-centennial of the Discourse.
*
Descartes is one of the greatest French thinkers, and one of the greatest geniuses that France has given to humanity.
His works, whose universality is one of its most characteristic traits, embrace the principal branches of knowledge, and in each of them Descartes was a great innovator.
He was a metaphysician, but in the manner of the great metaphysicians of the 17th century.
Marx wrote:
“Metaphysics in the 17th century (c.f., Descartes, of Liebniz, and others) still contained a positive secular element. It made discoveries in mathematics, physics, and other exact sciences which seemed to come within its scope.” [1]
In fact, Descartes was one of the creators of modern mathematics.
In physics Descartes is the first to have understood the entire extent and to have applied in a consistent manner the mathematical-experimental model, in this way taking a giant step in the path opened by Francis Bacon and Galileo, himself opening the way for Newton.
In the biological sciences as well, Descartes is the first to seek in a systematic manner to explain organic phenomena by the positive data of science.
Brilliant innovator in philosophy, in the principal branches of science Descartes was also, like Francis Bacon, an innovator in technique in the sense that he proclaimed with perfect clarity that true science was the condition for an effective technique. With this as his starting point, he occupied himself particularly in the renewal of medicine on a scientific basis.
Thanks to the genius of Descartes French thought in the 17th century sparkled with an incomparable shine.
*
But the honors rendered to Descartes in the current circumstances take on a new meaning, which the Discourse on Method, published in Holland anonymously for fear of persecution by the Church, is the symbol par excellence.
Descartes not only made brilliant scientific discoveries: he undertook the radical reform of the entire scientific edifice. He understood that modern science was the negation of the bookish and ineffective science left by the Middle Ages, and he expressed this negation in a decisive and consistent manner, rejecting en bloc Scholasticism, and Aristotle’s authority, with which the former associated itself. He thus completed the great critical work of the Renaissance.
This negation was so conscious in Descartes that he several times expressed the idea that between his philosophy and Scholasticism there is such an opposition that if one is true, then the other is necessarily false. Mechanics, which Descartes wanted to construct without the notion of force, since the latter was of Aristotelian origin, shows to what extent, in this negation of Scholasticism, Descartes wanted to be consistent, thus attracting the celebrated criticisms of Leibniz and later Voltaire, determining the Cartesians to later fight against the Newtonian notion of universal gravitation.
But what constitutes the most universal value of the work of Descartes, the source of his most decisive influence and, with mathematical physics, the most living aspect of his work, is that Descartes did not limit the negation of Scholasticism and the authority of tradition to the problems of particular sciences. He denied the authority of tradition and Scholasticism as a whole, proclaiming in their face the rights of critical spirit and Reason, seeking to derive from the most highly evolved sciences, like mathematics, a universal method.
In this way Descartes opens the way not only to other great metaphysicians who were champions of free thought, like Spinoza, but also to the French Encyclopedists. Descartes is the brilliant champion of modern thought, who sees in the positive sciences the only road that can lead man to true knowledge and, through true knowledge, to the conscious mastery of natural and social forces. D’Alembert wrote of him:
“Descartes dared, at least, to show good spirits how to shake off the yoke of the Scholastics, of opinion, of authority, in a word, of prejudices and barbarism. And by this revolt, the fruits of which we now harvest, he rendered a service to philosophy more essential perhaps than all those it owes to his illustrious successors.” [2]
The philosophical and scientific progress to which Descartes opened the way, as well as society’s evolution, have brought our knowledge and method to a superior level. The Cartesian dualism of extension and of thought, that is to say mind and matter, was already surpassed by Spinoza, who was surpassed in turn by Leibniz, and by French materialism of the 18th century.
“Mechanical French materialism,” Marx wrote, “adopted Descartes’ physics in opposition to his metaphysics. His followers were by profession anti-metaphysicians, i.e, physicists.” [3]
Mechanical materialism in its turn was surpassed by dialectical materialism.
But these diverse progresses fed off of Descartes and successively assimilated, in a more or less perfected form, what there is that is alive in the work of Descartes.
The Encyclopedists fought Descartes’ metaphysics. But, D’Alembert said:
“the arms that we use to fight him don’t belong to him any the less, just because we turn them against him.” [4]
Critical spirit, the right to free examination, Reason enlightened by the most modern science as a method of thought, all these aspects of Cartesianism have become an integral part of all of human civilization.
Today fascism attempts not only to prevent society from continuing its progress, which has taken it beyond Descartes; it wants to take things back to the period before him, to material and moral barbarism, to the bloody dictatorship of capitalist oligarchies in practice, to obscurantism and to the authoritarianism in theory. Just as they are in struggle against the great political traditions of the French Revolution, Mussolinian and Hitlerite fascism are in open struggle with all that is living in Cartesianism.
The Discourse on Method served as a preface to three scientific treatises in which Descartes demonstrates the effectiveness of his method in physics and mathematics. The Discourse itself announces the universality of the method. Published four years after the condemnation of Galileo, it was written in French and did not address itself only to the “learned” but above all to “opinion.” It begins with these words: “Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed.”
It is, from the first words, the negation of Scholasticism and the method which takes authority as the source of belief. The Discourse is a manifesto of modern thought with which Descartes engages combat.
In the celebration of the tri-centennial of the Discourse France and humanity affirm their will to resolutely defend reason against obscurantism, civilization against fascist barbarism.
Reaction set itself to methodically deform Descartes’ figure. It wanted to retain of him only spiritualist metaphysics. While extolling “the genius of Descartes” it made an effort to empty him of his progressive content.
But as Marx demonstrated, Descartes is one of the sources of French materialism of the 18th century.
This Cartesian materialism is at the origin of the progress of French science. In inviting the popular masses of France to celebrate the tri-centennial of the Discourse, our Party is putting back in place historical truth. In the face of fascism, which wants to exterminate even his memory, in the face of reaction that falsifies his image, it makes known the real figure of Descartes, hero of the struggle for free thought, brilliant ancestor of the French materialists.
If the materialism that comes from Descartes was one of the tendencies of French materialism, the other was the one that is derived from Locke. Marx demonstrated that that second tendency directly meets that of socialism: “the two tendencies,” he adds, “intersect in the course of development.” [5]
Dialectical materialism is, as Lenin demonstrated, the modern form of materialism.
It was able to go beyond the mechanistic character that was characteristic of the materialism of the 18th century, thanks to the progress in the natural sciences in which the works and influence of Descartes were decisive.
In the very measure to which dialectical materialism is the heir of the materialism of the 18th century, of which the materialism of Cartesian origin is one of the constitutive elements, there becomes evident yet again that evolution that reveals the profound ties of Marxism and French thought, and shows just how deep the roots of Communism are in French soil.
Marx and Engels, as well as Lenin, considered Descartes, like Spinoza and Leibniz, not only an advanced thinker, but even a dialectical thinker.
Descartes only reaches the limits imposed on him by the scientific knowledge of his era in surpassing them. He has a clear consciousness that the ancient logic of Aristotle — the expression of the method that Hegel will call metaphysical — is out of date and that it is another “logic” that is at work in mathematics, and that must be put to work in physics and the other sciences if we want them to reach the truth. The Cartesian opposition of modern mathematics to the logic of Aristotle, his idea of a universal method that extracted from what there is that is most general in mathematics, is already a step in the development which, via Kant, will lead to the clear consciousness of the dialectic in Hegel.
To this must be added the Cartesian conception of matter, which also announces, like the Monads of Leibniz, the evolution that will lead physics beyond the mechanical atom.
Descartes did not and could not go beyond mechanism. But he reached its outer limits and on many points went beyond mechanical materialism.
This underlines — like the role of Descartes as champion of modern thought — up to what point it is inexact and even anti-dialectical to make of him, as was done by the followers of Deborin, the philosopher in whom “the intelligence of the bourgeoisie is incarnated.”
To say this is to forget those “cycles of philosophy” of which Lenin spoke. It is to forget what is alive in Cartesianism.
The immortal elements of Cartesianism live in science which, by an incessant comparison of thought with reality, renders this knowledge more accurate every day; in the technique that owes its effectiveness to the truth of science.
They live in the work of Marx and Engels, of Lenin and Stalin who created and developed this true social science that is the condition of effective social action in making socialism pass from utopia to science, from dream to reality.
They live in the attachment of civilized men to Reason and Freedom.
They live in the political intelligence of the popular masses, who understand that the road to unity is that of victory over the enemy and of their liberation.
Notes
1. Marx, The Holy Family (ch VI)
2. D’Alembert, Discours préliminaire de l’Encyclopédie (IIme partie)
3. Marx, The Holy Family (ch VI)
4. D’Alembert, Discours préliminaire de l’Encyclopédie (IIme partie)
5. Marx, The Holy Family (ch VI)
The greater evil: the Democratic Party
| The Wasteland of Democratic Party Politics |
| Written by Glen Ford Executive Editor, Black Agenda Report | |
| There is no drama in the Democratic Party, this election year. The Democratic domain is a dead zone that has had all the oxygen sucked out of it by Obamaism. Of course, Obamaism is simply Clintonism with a darker face. Bill Clinton was the first Democratic Leadership Council President. Al Gore would have been the second, if George Bush had not stolen the 2000 election through massive disenfranchisement of Black voters in the Sunshine State. Gore did not see fit to contest the election based on the theft of hundreds of thousands of Black Florida votes. Instead, he hitched his fortunes to hanging chads and a Republican-dominated U.S. Supreme Court. There was a certain consistency in Al Gore’s decision not make an issue of the racism at the root of his loss. In the 1980s, Gore and Clinton formed the Democratic Leadership Council in order to dilute the influence of the growing numbers of Black southern voters. With southern whites steadily fleeing to the Republican Party, Gore and Clinton founded the DLC as a moneybag for corporate contributions to keep pro-business whites in Party leadership positions in the South, on the theory that he who controls the purse strings, controls the Party. It worked so well, the DLC quickly spread from its southern base to become the Party's national corporate wing, dedicated to suppressing the influence of Blacks and labor. The DLC used its money power to nurture the careers of Black corporate Democrats like Barack Obama, whose name first showed up on the DLC membership list in the summer of 2003. With overwhelming corporate support – especially from Wall Street – Obama went on to become Bill Clinton’s successor as the second Democratic Leadership Council president, just in time to save the banks from the 2008 meltdown. It should have come as no surprise that the second DLC president would not lift a finger to save Blacks from economic catastrophe. And so, three years later, the only good economic news for African Americans occurs in their own color-coded imaginations. We know that we are in an electoral political wasteland when the only major party discussion of U.S. empire and endless warfare takes place in the Republican presidential primary. On foreign policy, Ron Paul calls for closing hundreds of U.S. bases abroad, opposes U.S. empire-building and the fraudulent war on terror. Paul opposes preventive detention and the drug war, and he has led the charge against the Federal Reserve which, under President Obama, has become the umbilical cord that binds the imperial American state to the imperial bankers Wall Street. Of course, Ron Paul is no friend of Black people, or working people of any race. He is a racist, who has always worked closely with white supremacists who wish for a return to the apartheid America of the founding white fathers. Ron Paul’s foreign policy and civil liberties stance, as a Republican, is noteworthy only because of the contrasting light it shines on the vast desert that Democratic Party politics has become under the grip of militarists and Wall Street. The Republicans are ugly, nasty and evil. President Obama is the most attractive and articulate servant of Wall Street and war – and, therefore, an even more effective evil. There is only one alternative, and that is mass political action in opposition to the rule of the rich. Without a people's movement, the people inevitably lose. |
"Workers governments" in capitalist states
A ‘workers’ government’ as a step toward socialism
The concept of a workers’ government is the awkward child of the early Communist International. The thought it expresses is central to Marxism: that workers must strive to take political power. But in the early Comintern, it was attached to a perspective that was contentious for Marxists then and is so now: that workers can form a government that functions initially within a still-existing capitalist state.
As French Marxist Daniel Bensaid commented, “The algebraic formula of a ‘workers’ government’ has given rise over time to the most varied and often contradictory interpretations.”(1)
Let us see what light can be shed on this question by the record of the Comintern’s 1922 World Congress, recently published in English.(2) This was the gathering that held the Comintern’s most extensive discussion of the workers’ government question and adopted its initial position.
The congress debate focused on countries like Germany where sustained, mass workers’ struggles posed the possibility that working people might form a government. It was therefore necessary to pose the concept of workers’ power not just as a long-range perspective but in terms of the existing workers’ organizations, with their strengths and weaknesses.
On the other hand, workers in Germany, Italy, France, and neighbouring countries did not then possess a network of revolutionary workers’ councils similar to the Russian Soviets of 1917. Most of the organized workers’ movement was still directed by pro-capitalist leaders, and Communists were still a minority current in the working class. The question of workers’ power had to be addressed in that framework.
In that context, the Comintern had launched efforts to build a united front of workers’ struggle, challenging the organizations led by pro-capitalist officials to join in efforts to win immediate demands such as opening the capitalists’ financial records, workers’ control of distribution of food, shifting the tax burden to the rich, and arming workers for self-defense against reactionary gangs. How could such a program be implemented? By a government of all workers’ parties, the Comintern answered — a “workers’ government.” (See “The Origins of United Front Policy” on this website.)
Introducing this concept to the Fourth Congress in November 1922, Comintern President Gregory Zinoviev conceded that this was an issue that “has not been sufficiently clarified.”(3) Delegates did indeed advance varied and contradictory interpretations. The text proposed for adoption went through more drafts than any other congress document. Even after its adoption, three different versions were circulated to Comintern parties. (For the three texts, see “The Comintern’s Unknown Decision on Workers’ Governments.”) Most subsequent English-language discussion has focused on a preliminary draft that differs substantially from the text that the Congress finally adopted.
The debate had opened two years earlier, during a general strike by German workers. The head of the Social Democratic trade unions, Carl Legien, called for formation of a government of workers’ parties and trade unions. His goal, to be sure, was to end the strike and begin to re-establish bourgeois order, as a united Social Democratic government had done after the German revolution of November 1918.
But circumstances had changed. Power no longer rested with revolutionary workers’ councils, as in November 1918, but with a bourgeois coalition regime. A workers’ government would draw its authority not from parliament, where deputies from workers’ parties were a decided minority, but from the workers’ mass movement. The German Communist party stated that, under these conditions, “formation of a socialist government … would create extremely favourable conditions for vigorous action by the proletarian masses,” and expressed conditional approval of the proposal.(4) A heated debate broke out in both the German party and the Comintern as to whether this stand was appropriate.
A call for a workers’ government of this type in Germany was included the next year in the Comintern resolution launching a campaign for a workers’ united front. This gave rise to an extended debate, which carried over into the Fourth World Congress in 1922.
Pseudonym or transition
The central issue was whether the term “workers’ government” was merely a pseudonym for the rule of workers’ councils under Communist leadership – a dictatorship of the proletariat – or whether it represented a transitional stage to that goal. The latter concept, warned Amadeo Bordiga, central leader of the Italian Communist Party, implied that the working class can take power “in some way other than through the armed struggle for power.”
Ruth Fischer, who led the leftist minority in the German party, warned that the concept of revolution was being watered down by “styling its hair in ‘Western’ fashion, creating democratic transitional stages between what we have and what we aim for.” Initially, Zinoviev also had held this view. He retracted it as the congress opened but continued to express the underlying thought in more guarded form.(5)
- Ernst Meyer
Leaders of the German party majority and Karl Radek, on the other hand, argued that the workers’ government was not a pseudonym for a workers’ dictatorship but a “point of transition” toward it. Achievement of a workers’ government can “lead to a phase of sharpened class struggles through which a proletarian dictatorship will ultimately emerge,” said Ernst Meyer. It will be parliamentary “only in a subordinate sense” and “must be carried by the masses.” Karl Radek called such a government “the starting point of a struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat.”(6)
During the editing process, the congress text was progressively aligned with a “transitional” concept of a workers’ government. The final text sharply counterposed it to a parliamentary-based “bourgeois-Social-Democratic coalition, whether open or disguised.” A workers’ government can be sustained only by the struggles of the masses, the final draft states; its enumerated tasks begin with “arming the proletariat” and end with “breaking the resistance of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie.”(7)
Communists should stand ready to “form a workers’ government with non-Communist workers’ parties and workers’ organizations,” the resolution states, but only “if there are guarantees that the workers’ government will carry out a genuine struggle against the bourgeoisie along the lines described above,” and subject to other safeguards.
Illusory workers’ governments
The clarity of this position was seriously undermined, however, by the simultaneous use of the term “workers’ government” to describe rule by bourgeois workers’ parties that, while introducing some reforms, acted as loyal administrators of the capitalist order. This concept was voiced mainly by Zinoviev, who thus managed to stand simultaneously on both the left and the right wings of the discussion. Zinoviev used the expression “liberal workers’ government” to describe the Labour regimes that had administered the Australian capitalist state after 1904 and a future Labour Party government in Britain. Such a regime, he said, “could be the jumping-off point for revolutionizing the country,” could take many steps “objectively directed against the bourgeois state,” and “can finish in the hands of the left wing.” Surprisingly, Zinoviev saw a parallel here with the role of the Russian Mensheviks in 1917.(8)
This position was opposed by leaders of the German delegation, who submitted an amendment distinguishing between “illusory” and “genuine” workers’ governments. The amendment also specified that the illusory “liberal” or “Social Democratic” workers’ governments
…are not revolutionary workers’ governments at all, but in reality hidden coalition governments between the bourgeoisie and antirevolutionary workers’ leaders. Such “workers’ governments” are tolerated at critical moments by the weakened bourgeoisie, in order to deceive the proletariat … fend off the proletariat’s revolutionary onslaught and win time. Communists cannot take part in such a government. On the contrary, they must relentlessly expose to the masses the true nature of such a false “workers’ government.”(9)
Although adopted unanimously, the amendment was not incorporated into the published Russian version of the resolution, which has served as the basis for translations into English. As a result, English-language comment on this issue, singling out Zinoviev’s position for attack, has criticized the congress for the very weakness that its delegates sought to remedy.
Two unaddressed questions
Two other important aspects of the workers’ government issue, although posed in the congress, were left unaddressed.
The first concerned the role of peasants. During the congress debate, Vasil Kolarov, the senior delegate from Bulgaria, said that “the workers’ government is not posed in agrarian countries like the Balkans.” The final resolution, by contrast, referred to the possibility of a “government of workers and the poorer peasants” in regions such as the Balkans and Czechoslovakia.(10)
This question was most urgently posed in Bulgaria, governed by a radical peasant party that was facing a threatened coup by rightist forces. Here, an ideal opportunity to apply the concept of a workers’ and peasants’ government was blocked by the Bulgarian Communists’ hostility to ruling peasant party. No congress delegate mentioned the situation in Bulgaria. Only a few months later, the Bulgarian Communists’ sectarianism contributed to a tragic defeat of the workers’ movement.
The second unaddressed issue concerned the nature of workers’ rule. The resolution’s final text stated that “a genuinely proletarian workers’ government … in its pure form can be embodied only in the Communist Party.” Zinoviev said that only this variant “is indeed a pseudonym for the dictatorship of the proletariat.” The implication was that if Communists allied with non-Communist forces in a revolutionary government, this was only a temporary expedient until the Communists were strong enough to rule alone.
A comment by Leon Trotsky suggested quite a different approach. Describing the Bolsheviks’ alliance with the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries in the first months of Soviet rule, Trotsky said the Left SRs had been ousted from the government on their own initiative, not that of the Bolsheviks.(11)
Nothing further was said on this point. As published, the resolution suggests a lack of clarity on the difference between workers’ rule and rule by the Communist Party.
An empirical approach
The resolution contains a typology of workers’ governments with five categories. In each case, delegates were thinking of a specific context, as follows:
- Illusory: Liberal workers’ government (Britain).
- Illusory: Social-Democratic workers’ government (Germany).
- Genuine: Government of workers and peasants (Balkans).
- Genuine: Workers’ government with Communist participation. (Germany).
- Genuinely proletarian workers’ government (Soviet Russia).(12)
Zinoviev stressed to congress delegates that this list was not complete and that other types of workers’ governments could occur. He warned that “in the search for a rigorous scientific definition, we might overlook the political side of the situation.”(13) In other words, the Comintern’s approach was not prescriptive but empirical. It sought to analyze situations actually posed in the struggle at that moment.
There were at that time three previous examples of workers’ governments, none of which fit neatly into this five-point schema. Thus:
- The Paris Commune, an elected revolutionary workers’ government at war with a still-existing bourgeois regime.
- The early Soviet republic: as noted, a coalition regime based on revolutionary workers’ and peasants’ soviets.
- The revolutionary governments of Bavaria and Hungary in 1919, where, as Chris Harman and Tim Potter have noted, “bourgeois power virtually collapsed…. The workers’ government came into being and afterwards had to create the structure of proletarian power.”(14)
The resolution also said nothing regarding the government that might result in the colonial and semi-colonial countries from the struggle for an anti-imperialist united front. This question was urgently posed in the years following the congress in China, where a mistaken Comintern policy resulted in a calamitous defeat. In the year of that setback, the United Opposition in the Bolshevik Party, led by Trotsky and Zinoviev, formulated a governmental proposal for China based on the Bolshevik strategic arsenal from the years before 1917: a revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.(15) Trotsky was soon to repudiate the concept. Nonetheless, it remains among the possible variants of a workers’ and peasants’ government.
Long-term relevance?
Almost a century has passed since the Comintern debated the workers’ government question. The revolutionary era that began in 1914 has passed away; we are headed toward new revolutions, under new conditions. There is no equivalent today of the mass Communist parties of the 1920s. The Comintern’s decisions on governmental policy were rooted in a political environment that no longer exists.
It can be harmful to employ the Comintern decisions as a template to be imposed on a vastly different reality. The relevance of its workers’ government discussion lies rather in alerting us to the possibility that working people should strive for governmental power even in the absence of a soviet-type network of workers’ councils.
The Fourth Congress decision suggest that workers’ efforts to form a government, far from representing a barrier to socialist revolution, can be a significant transitional step toward its realization. The decision also sketches out conditions under which a workers’ government may actually exist within a capitalist state, for a transitional period, with positive results.
The early Comintern position retains its relevance to struggles for socialism in the new century. This gives us good reason to revisit the debates in the Comintern’s first half-decade of activity over its awkward but vigorous child, the concept of a workers’ government.
This working paper was presented as part of the International Communist Movement stream of the Eighth Historical Materialism Annual Conference in London, England, on November 11, 2011.
For the variant texts of the Fourth Comintern Congress decision on workers’ governments, see “The Comintern’s Unknown Decision on Workers’ Governments” on this website.
Related articles on this website
- “The Shape of Socialist Strategy“
- “On the Meaning of Popular Front“
- “Clara Zetkin’s Struggle for the United Front“
References
1. Daniel Bensaid, 2011, La Politique comme art stratégique, Paris: Éditions Syllepse, p. 69.
2. John Riddell (ed.), 2012, Toward the United Front: Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922 (hereafter TUF), Leiden: Brill.
3. TUF, p. 129.
4. Pierre Broué, 2005, The German Revolution 1917–1923, Leiden: Brill, 369.
5. TUF, pp. 182, 147.
6. TUF, pp. 139–40, 167.
7. TUF, p. 1159.
8. TUF, pp. 266–7.
9. TUF, pp. 1098–9.
10. TUF, pp. 243, 1161
11. TUF, p. 1161, 267, 1003.
12. TUF, p. 1160–1.
13. TUF, p. 267–8.
14. Chris Harman and Tim Potter, “The Workers’ Government,” in International Socialism, February 7, 2007.
15. Leon Trotsky 1980, Challenge of the Left Opposition, vol. 2, New York: Pathfinder, p. 369.