200 years since the birth of Charles Dickens

Franz Mehring

Charles Dickens

(1912)

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From Berel Lang and Forrest Williams (eds.), Marxism and Art: Writings in aesthetics and Criticism, New York: McKay, 1972, pp. 438-42.
First published in Neue Zeit, Vol.30 No.1, pp.621 et seq., 1912
Subsequently reprinted in Zur Literaturgeschichte von Hebbel bis Gorki, Berlin: Soziologische Verlagsanstalt, 1929.
Transcribed by Danielo Gaido.
Marked up by Einde O'Callaghan for the Marxists' Internet Archive.

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Franz Mehring, journalist, historian, critic, was one of Germany's leading Socialists in both word and deed. Born in Pomerania in 1846 of a middle-class family, he completed his university studies with a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Leipzig. His brilliant articles appeared in newspapers which he edited and, beginning in 1890, in Karl Kautsky's Neue Zeit. He joined the anti-war "Spartacus" group founded by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, spent many months in prison, and died in 1919 a few days after hearing of the assassination of his two "Spartacus" friends. His best-known historical works are History of the German Socialist Democracy (1897-08) and Karl Marx: The Story of His Life, published in Germany in 1918 after delays by military censors, and now a classic biography of Marx.

OF the three great English novelists during the long reign of Queen Victoria – Bulwer, Dickens and Thackeray – Dickens was the most loved and most read, although the literature and philosophy of the Continent were much less familiar to him than to either of his classically educated rivals. Yet he easily outstripped them by his original talent and by that indomitable energy for work and life which was perhaps his most outstanding quality.

He was through and through an Englishman; it has been said, not unjustly, that he never left behind him the Cockney of London. In his letters, published after his death by his friend Forster, he complains repeatedly as he journeys in the Swiss mountains, unmarred then by today's hordes of tourists, of the lack of street noises which were, he felt, indispensable for his creative production. "I cannot say how much I miss the streets," he wrote in 1846 from Lausanne where he wrote one of his greatest novels, Dombey and Son.

It is as though they give something to my brain which it cannot do without if it is to work. For a week or fortnight, I can write wonderfully in a remote place; one day in London suffices then to set me up and off. But the trouble and work of writing day after day without this magic lantern is enormous ... My characters seem to want to stand still if they do not have a London around them. I wrote very little in Genoa and thought I had avoided traces of its influence – but, good God, even there I had at least two miles of streets by the lights of which I could roam around at night, and a great theater each evening

Dozens of similar complaints appear in the writer's letters. Among his brothers in Apollo he stands, in this respect, quite alone.

The nerve-shattering life of the city was the real spirit of his artistic creation. He knew that life in its heights and depths; with wonderful penetration he grasped its social types and embodied them in living figures, many of which are still popular in England and beyond England as well. Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller compare in fame with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. His heart, even when he was a celebrated dinner guest of Ministers of State and a close friend to all the famous names of England, was with the poor and unfortunate from whose midst he had, by his huge strength of spirit and life, raised himself to brilliant fame. No one could feel more deeply for Nature's stepchildren, the blind, the dumb, and the deaf, nor more deeply – and this says even more – for the stepchildren of society. Even bourgeois aesthetes said of Dickens, partly in accusation, partly in wonder, that he never confused in his sympathy for the working classes crudity, criminality, immorality, or filth.

His creative powers were almost unbelievable. As much as he enjoyed the exciting social life which the fruits of his writing made possible, he still managed to write in scarcely two decades twelve substantial novels as well as a host of stories and sketches, a yearly Christmas tale, travel journals and other things as well; matters which might otherwise occupy the whole of a man's life, such as the founding of a newspaper, the Daily News, or a substantial weekly magazine, Household Words, were for him incidental. Attempts were made to explain his productivity as carelessness; he was accused of a lack of economy, of clumsiness in his plots and denouements, of the improbabilities of his stories, of the mannered style, of a broadness in his humor, of exaggerations, and so on. It is difficult in fact to argue with many of these accusations, which are understandable in light of the facility with which Dickens wrote. Still it goes too far to contest on those grounds the honors due him as the author, since in many of his creations (and not in the least of them) he pursued certain moral ends.

One need only mention in this connection Oliver Twist, in which he describes the poor-relief with such biting humor, or Nicholas Nickleby where he does the same for the school systems, or Bleak House in which he does it for the judiciary. As it happens, notwithstanding the shameful conditions which they reveal, these novels remain a claim to fame on behalf of the English people. If a German author, either in Dickens' time or now, had dared to portray the venality and inflexibility of the official institutions of the government as Dickens did with respect to the judiciary in Bleak House, he would be defamed in all patriotic circles, including the so-called liberal ones, as a disgrace to the Government; and the insulted judges would prepare their genuine Prussian requital, inviting the malcontent to lengthy afterthoughts in prison. There is something true in the writer's words: "Only a free people is worthy of an Aristophanes." To return to Dickens, however, he did not consider tendentiousness in art to be objectionable, but only that tendentiousness which utilized inartistic means. And in the choice of his own means, Dickens, as his letters edited by Forster show, was extraordinarily deliberate and circumspect. Of course, according to an aesthetic doctrine which he himself had contrived. But Lessing already knew that each genius creates new rules for himself; and as strongly as an aesthetic theory may attempt to draw the boundaries around ethical judgment and artistic taste, in the practice of artistic creation those boundaries are continually overrun, as many of the most famous art works of all people and times attest. "To better and to convert men" is an undeniable drive even in the areas of writing and painting; and to attempt to evade it anxiously can readily lead to opposite extremes represented in those tasteless and bland sauces into which a full blown morality is poured under the guise of art.

How strong the artistic temperament was in Dickens is shown most forcefully by the fact that despite his attentiveness to the most important questions of public life and despite his radically democratic sentiments, he remained himself outside of political life. Other possible grounds for this reticence – lack of insight or even of courage – can be excluded for Dickens, because he so often did touch the most sensitive spots in the sensibilities of the ruling classes. But his democratic convictions were not able to stand where they encountered a total lack of artistic sensibility; how bitterly and unjustly did he condemn the United States. And, on the other hand, the artistic quality of Italian life reconciled him to the harsh conditions of the Italian middle and lower classes. Once when he entered Switzerland from Italy he wrote:

The cleanliness of the small doll houses is really wonderful for someone coming from Italy. But the beautiful Italian manners, the soft language the swift acknowledgment of a friendly look, of a word in jest, the enchanting expression of a wish to be pleasant to one and all – these I have left behind the Alps. When I think of them, I long too for dirt, brick floors, naked walls, unwhitewashed ceilings and broken windows.

One should not assume, however, that Dickens as artist saw less deeply in his art than the politician might in his – that Dickens fell into the tired game of playing at charities by which the bourgeoisie attempt to quiet their false consciousness. In fact, the recognition of precisely these perverse impulses made him a Democrat: tirelessly he fought "the worst and meanest of all cant, the cant of philanthropy." To the Christian Socialist he called:

Give a man and his family a glimpse of Heaven by a little air and light, give him water; help him to get clean, brighten the dark atmosphere in which he sees himself, and which makes him callous to everything else ... Then, but not before, will he be willing to hear of him whose thoughts so readily were with the poor, and who sympathized with all human grief.

hen his friend Cruikshank publishes a series of sketches depicting the terrible results of alcoholism, Dickens praises their technical execution, but adds, nonetheless:

The philosophy of the matter, however, as doctrine I take to be quite false – since to be more accurate, the drinking would have to be seen to originate from worry, poverty or ignorance, the three things from which its awful spectre always sets out. Then the sketches would have been a double edged sword – but too radical, I think, for our good old George.

Dickens regarded alcoholism as the English national vice, but even with respect to it he kept himself free of narrowly partisan fanaticism; he himself enjoyed a drink and was never overcome by the attractions of abstinence. Nonetheless, he basically favored the temperance movements; and it was only as they sought to uproot alcoholism with pietistic and moralistic sermonizing that he poked fun at them, for example in one of the scenes in Pickwick Papers. He reiterated constantly the social causes of alcoholism – the confined, unhealthy dwellings with their disgusting odors, the mean working places with their lack of light, air, and water. He felt that if one showed so emphatically the side of the coin on which the common people with their mistakes and crimes were engraved, one was the more obligated to show the other side as well, where the mistakes and crimes of the governments which ruled the people were impressed.

One cannot call him, then, a socialist writer. He lacked any speculative plan or inclination along these lines, quite aside from the fact that it was much more difficult then than now to visualize bourgeois society overthrown and reconstructed on new foundations. Dickens had to work himself up from the bitterest poverty, in the absence of any systematic education; all philosophy would have seemed to him, had he ever troubled himself with the question, a bit foolish. As difficult as the first stages of his life might have been, he was at 27 a famous writer; bourgeois society looked to him uncannily like a stepmother. What it was able to offer, it strenuously heaped on him. He did not, however, become its toady on that account, as did so many like him and for lesser prices; his good heart and his healthy understanding of mankind kept his eyes open to its faults. But with all his passionate words his political credo remained that the institutions of England must be improved, not replaced by new ones.

In the last decade of his life Dickens was overtaken by the auri sacra fames, the unholy lust for gold, which was richly enough satisfied. Not only the writer ran afoul of this; the man himself also deteriorated in a version of suicide awful in its details. It was, apparently, certain love affairs which gave him the idée fixe that he had to earn more and more in order to assure a lavish living not only in the present but also in the future for whomever he was involved with. The extraordinary talent of representation which Dickens had restricted to playacting, reading aloud, and dinner table talk, he now turned to the public recital of his works. His friend Forster had the courage to tell him honestly that this means of earning money was not worthy of him, but this single friendly voice remained unheard in the storm of approbation which accompanied the writer's new career. He had, however, purchased his own demons, which pursued and scourged him from then on and until, in July, 1870, he broke down.

Thus, a shadow marks the twilight of the writer; but this shadow should not be allowed to obscure the brilliant light of his dawn and midday. The grave of the writer, on February 7th, his hundredth birthday, deserves from the German working class as well, a wreath of homage.

Raw Manners

A review I wrote several years ago and just found:

"Five Red Herrings" (1975)

a review by Jay Rothermel

By the early 1940s many creative artists were pushed toward defeatism,
capitulation to the bourgeoisie, and sometimes outright reaction.

The rise and triumph of fascism in Germany, the class collaborationist
policies of the Stalin leadership in the USSR, and the fall of
republican Spain were all prelude to September 1, 1939. In Dorothy L.
Sayers this is seen in her complete abandonment of novel writing after
Busman's Honeymoon (1937) and embrace of religious obscurantism. Her
play cycle The Man Born to be King (1941) and the later Dante
translations are today a mere pendant, ignored completely by those who
know her true faith in craft and social life was best expressed in the
Wimsey stores, filled with life and exalted aestheticism.

The contempt and dismissiveness leveled at Dorothy l. Sayers' novels
about Lord Peter Wimsey runs like an unbroken thread through most
criticism of the genre. Damned by damns and faint praise, Sayers is
depicted as a woman who made a fool of herself over the detective in her
novels.

"Falling in love with her hero" is a commonly used phrase, and an
undeserved one. Sayers, unlike most crime novelists, developed splendid
gifts as a writer in exploring Wimsey, bringing him forth as a real
character and not the usual genre stereotype.

Wimsey is a hard, harsh and haunted man. Like many who came through the
Great War, he could not find a proper use for the rest of his life. Over
the no-mans-land of his mind, Wimsey was able to spread a thin patina of
simulated humanity: interest in incunabula and detection; a passion for
"butting in" and correcting the fortunes and destinies of others. He
mastered the fine psychological art of silly-ass self-deprecation which
harried opponents and friends alike.

All but four of the novels feature Wimsey in his bachelor days, before
falling in love with accused poisoned and novelist Harriet Vane. While
the Vane novels are not inferior to the others, or to the wonderful
short stories collected in Lord Peter Views the Body (1928), they do
suffer a certain limitation of scene compared to the open air and rude
good health of Unnatural Death (1927) and The Nine Tailors (1934).

In the early 1970s the BBC made a series of adaptations of the non-Vane
Wimsey novels. They starred Ian Carmichael, who had previously donned
the monocle in /The World of Wooster/. Each production has been released
on video and DVD, and the DVDs are also presented as a box set.

In TV mysteries, pacing is all. Carmichael's performance as the brittle,
bracing aristocrat pushes the plot forward beyond all the patent
absurdities of the mystery genre. Why would the police tolerate an
amateur sleuth bulling his way through a murder investigation? Always
steps ahead, Wimsey leaves neither police nor viewer time to reflect
upon the question. The pleasures of language, character, and mis en
scene take care of the rest.

* * *

Five Red Herrings, like Clouds of Witness (1926), is about the
tragic toll taken on individuals by bad manners.

W. H. Auden wrote an essay in 1938 called "The Guilty Vicarage" in which
he said that murder mysteries recapitulate the Biblical story of the
fall, hence their popularity with godless modern readers, apparently.
This sounds like the special pleading of smart people who need an
intellectual justification for reading popular fiction instead of taking
another futile stab at the first few pages Moby Dick. Well-written
mysteries are as enjoyable as any other well-wrought fiction. It was
P.D.Q. Bach composer Peter Schickele who famously said of music: "If it
sounds good, it is good."

Puzzle mysteries are said to appeal to snobbish intellectuals who want
to put their reasoning to a test, much like scrabble or chess players or
people who work newspaper crosswords each day. The smug certainly want
to justify reading mysteries by equating them with some form of august
mentation. Such comparisons usually smack of sham or guilty conscience.
When Edmund Wilson wrote "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" (1945) he
was declaring independence from rationalizing readers who tried
disguising their desire to be titillated as though it were a date with
Finnegan's Wake.

Five Red Herrings takes place in and around an artists' colony in
wildest Scotland, near Gatehouse and Kirkcudbright. The area is a raw
St. Ives of the north, populated by various bohemian painters. Fine
exterior photography lends the cold, unforgiving sky and clear waters of
frigid trout streams a vivid and almost palpable life. When Wimsey dons
thick gauntlets before driving in his open car, one's own hands begin to
ache of cold.


Scottish painter Sandy Campbell (Ian Ireland) is the terror of the
colony. A "maudlin brute," he bullies and terrorizes the men who become
suspects in his murder. His explosive temper and bloody-minded
contrariness have alienated fellow artists who would normally be natural
allies and confidantes. He takes any comment as just cause for battle.
His most obscene outrage is taking a cut-throat razor to the beard and
scalp of a fellow painter (Russell Hunter) he has waylaid one night on a
lonely road. Justifiable homicide never had more justification.

Most murder mysteries deal with social humiliation, vigilante
retribution, and redress of balance: all pragmatic expressions of
bourgeois ideology that disguise and make bearable the unpredictable
violence bred by the workings of the law of value. The Wimsey stories
are no different. The enjoyment resides in how the changes are rung.

The "puzzle aspect" of Five Red Herrings is Lord Peter's demolition of
the murderer's alibi. It is a buoyant, open-air series of deductions, a
far cry from the stereotypical "gathering of suspects" which sinks the
ending of so many Golden Age of Mystery novels and their film
adaptations. One of the great strengths of any Dorothy L. Sayers novel
is variation of setting, and the BBC version of Five Red Herrings
replicates this perfectly.

The pleasures of Sayers' Wimsey stories and novels are many. Freshly
imagined and ingeniously presented characters, evocative locations,
logical scene building, consistent and clever handling of point of view
(one thinks of Miss Climpson's letters in Unnatural Death) are all
Sayers strengths. "Simplicity itself," as the saying goes.

Lukacs meets the academics

From the Marx & Philosophy Review of Books

Michael J. Thompson (ed.) Georg Lukács Reconsidered: Critical Essays in Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics  Continuum, London and New York, 2011. 272pp., £70 / $130 hb ISBN 9781441108760

Reviewed by Tony Mckenna

Lukács Reconsidered contains 13 essays on Lukács, and is split into three sections. The first considers his philosophical legacy, the second his contribution to Aesthetic theory, and the final part looks at his relation to critical theory.
The collection begins with Stephen Eric Bronner's essay on Lukács which starts with a brief but important examination of the historical context in which Lukács wrote his masterpiece History and Class Consciousness. Bronner observes,'monopolies and trusts were increasingly dominating the market … the industrial proletariat was growing at a rapid rate. Social democratic parties were emerging with this class as its mass base. These organisations required a clear and comprehensible ideology.' (14) Such ideology conceived history as a series of mechanical, economic progressions which would inexorably generate the proletarian revolution out of themselves paying scant regard to the individual actors subsumed under their sweeping telos. 'History was believed to develop in stages… Each historical stage would build on the progressive accomplishments of its predecessor and only when the contradictions of a given stage were resolved would the next appear.' (14-15)
It is in light of this that History and Class Consciousness must be understood - as the focused philosophical attempt to restore the subjective moment – 'consciousness' – as an integral moment in revolutionary transformation, without at the same time annihilating the objective structures and determinations of social existence through which such consciousness is filtered.
The insight is a worthwhile one. But Bronner proves unable to relate it to Lukács' theorisation of the proletariat as the identical subject-object of history. According to Lukács the proletariat contains within itself the secret of the capitalist mode of production, for the worker is the personification of the commodity, the commodity form as a concrete social existence, as living thing: for the proletariat, therefore, knowledge of the object of capitalism – i.e., knowledge of the commodity form – is simultaneously a knowledge of subject, a knowledge of self as a historically created substance.
Bronner confuses this utterly. He says, 'the commodity from wherein capital is the subject of the system and the proletariat its object … in reality it is the other way round.' (19) Thus the opposition between proletariat and capital is not dissolved but maintained albeit in an inverted form – 'the other way round'. Such a fundamental misconstruction permits Bronner to dismiss the Lukácian theorisation in the following terms: 'the subject-object of history was always a figment of the philosophical imagination. But the quest for human dignity (that utopia projects) is real: it provides a regulative ideal to inspire practical resistance.' (29)
In other words the antinomy between subject and object, theory and practise, which created the very schism in Kantianism that Lukács was reacting against, is, by Bronner, preserved, and grafted onto Lukács' account retroactively – the moment of the subjective – 'consciousness' – has no necessary connection with the form of social being it mediates (proletariat) – thus the revolutionary transformation is reduced to a utopic pipe dream – a 'regulative' aspiration to which practise tends but can never realise.
Tom Rockmore's article maintains the unfortunate practise of reformulating Lukács through the prism of Kant – if anything Rockmore is more blatant in this, informing the reader that the Kantian Copernican revolution posits as a necessary condition for knowledge 'that the subject construct its cognitive object.'(41) So far, so good. But Rockmore continues, 'this constuctivist claim is a form of what as early as the Differenzschrft Hegel calls the philosophy of identity (Identitatsphilosphie). At the point of knowledge, there must be an identity, based on the subject and object, knower and known.'(41)
Notice how 'cognitive object' becomes in the latter sentence 'object' – an elision which manages to blur the fact that Lukács and Marx (and the classical German philosophers) were not responding to the moment of identity in Kant, but rather the moment of difference, for the true object in the Kantian system repels cognition by its undisclosed and indecipherable nature; the noumenal stands in irreconcilable contradiction to the phenomenal. This was the contradiction which Fichte, Schelling and Hegel grappled with; it provides the basis of the dialectic which runs through German philosophy and whose (historical) resolution culminates in the concrete identity of the Marxist-Lukácian subject-object , as proletariat.
Rockmore's misappreciation of this proves devastating. By dissolving the dialectic of subject and object in pure identity, Rockmore can't help but form an eclectic, pragmatist account of Marx and Lukács. In his account Lukács simply picks and chooses what elements he likes from previous philosophies much as a person chooses different foods in an all you can eat buffet. 'From Kant he takes the constructivist insight that a necessary condition of knowledge is an identity between subject and object … from Fichte he appropriates the idea of a subject as basically active and never passive … from Hegel, he takes over the insight … that at the point of self consciousness, which is achieved only through producing products.' (45)
Fortunately Konstantinos Kavoulakos does manage to provide a lucid account of the dialectic of classical German Philosophy and Lukács' relation to it. Kavoulakos begins with Kant who refers to our inability to … reach an identity between thought and being … the problem of the "thing in itself", the intelligible source of phenomena which is unknown to us.' (156) Fichte's philosophy is understood as the endeavour to reconcile such dualism by maintaining an 'original unity of subject and object'. (157) which itself is the result of the subject (as the ego absolutised) generating the world, the object, from itself. But just as in Kant, albeit that the Fichtean ego is not working upon a noumenal object, nevertheless there is preserved an antinomy between subject and object; in the Fichtean paradigm the object is lost in as much as it is one-sidedly determined by the categories of a subjective idealism, and retains no independence, no power, in its own right.
For this, Kavoulakos notes, Lukács turns necessarily 'to the dialectic of subject and object in Hegel … the subject is conceived now as the producer of the world, whose product it itself is, within the frame of a historical process of a continual emergence of new forms of mediation between subject and object.' (157) Kavoulakos uses this to bolster his own profound and effective critique of Honneth's account of Lukács. 'What is most interesting for us here is that Lukács insistence that the problems of bourgeois thought can be resolved through a holistic conception of history is totally absent from Honneth's reconstruction.' (159)
In the excellent essay 'Reification and its Critics' Andrew Feenberg also emphasises the importance of such a subject-object historical dialectic – 'history moves forward through the realisation of its objective tendencies but the tendencies can only realise themselves when they are seized and appropriated by consciousness. Has Marxism ever said anything else?' (174)
By bringing the historical dialectic to the fore Feenberg is able to show how, for Lukács, the phenomenon of reification isn't reducible to a form of consciousness in which mistaken or reactionary ideas are adopted simply because they are pervasive. In fact 'reification is in the first instance practical rather than theoretical', (179) for when 'most goods circulate as commodities the original relationships between producers and consumers are obscured' (176) at the level of social being, or as Lukács has it, 'the direct forms of appearance of social being are not, however, subjective fantasies of the brain, but moments of the real forms of existence.' (quoted 176)
Feenberg argues that Adorno's critique of Lukács remains absolutely oblivious to this, for, according to Adorno, 'Lukács lapsed into idealism, believed the proletarian subject could constitute social reality independent of any institutional framework, or objective constraint on its action.' (173) Adorno accuses Lukács of an almost Fichtean subjective idealism without referencing the dialectical interplay between subject and object which Lukács so meticulously cultivates – 'Adorno is tone deaf to the music of Lukács' dialectic'. (173)
For Lukács (like Hegel and Marx before him) the historical dialectic of subject and object involved the social totality mediated by an ontology of labour. Michael J. Thompson situates the concept of labour in the Lukácian oeuvre in his impressive essay 'Ontology and Totality'. Critical theory increasingly tends to see social labour as 'co-determinate along with language by preceding man and society, making it possible in the first place', (236) with thinkers like Adorno, Habermas and Honneth fortifying such a thesis which remains essentially epistemological. But 'epistemology, which inquires into the structure of consciousness, is unable to grasp the process of realization, or the way consciousness is shaped, determined by external objective forces,' (236)
Conversely, by developing an ontology of labour Lukács is able proceed from a process in which 'subjectivity and objectivity are dialectically united … a process of realisation …[whereby] our labor discloses to us the true nature of the world and ourselves … we discover the rational structure of the world through praxis, through labor as opposed to contemplative thought.' (239-40).
Such a dialectic is able to unite knowledge about the world with the categories and structures of the world itself through the ongoing, active process of transformation (labour) whereby man becomes man. Under capitalism however the labour process is fragmented and alienated; the semblance of the whole is lost. Thompson's essay expresses very clearly the need to overcome this – 'to grasp the totality of the concrete nature of the social world' (243). But if the dialectic he has elaborated between subjectivity and objectivity is to be preserved, this must occur not only through the conscious, theoretical appreciation of 'totality' but concomitantly through the practical refashioning of the world as 'totality' at the level of social existence (Subject-object identity). However the one agent capable of taking a collective control of society's reproductive organs at the level of social existence and drawing them together in a consciously organized whole is almost entirely absent from Thompson's analysis. The proletariat, nevertheless, remains the lynch pin of Lukács' own.
Perhaps the essayist who is closest to the Lukácian position elaborated in History and Class Consciousness is the Trotskyite Michael Löwy. I have never read anything by Löwy which was less than excellent and his contribution here is no exception. Löwy focuses on Lukács' mysterious 'lost' manuscript – Tailism and Dialectic – only discovered recently, providing a reply to the attacks levelled at History and Class Consciousness in the mid 1920s. Löwy places 'tailism' in the context of debates with Rudas and Deborin, concluding that Tailsman is 'a powerful Hegelian/Marxist apology of revolutionary subjectivity'(68). However, it is also a flawed work in as much as it 'ignores the soviets and refers only to the party' (68).
Other essays include Timothy Hall's well considered and descriptive critique of Honneth's appropriation of the Lukácian concepts of reification and praxis. Like Feenberg, Hall is able to argue persuasively that 'Honneth's reconstruction of Lukács ends up with converting his theory of praxis into a form of moral theory.'(201) Stanley Aronowitz offers a much needed and thoughtful re-examination of Lukács' 'undervalued' The Destruction of Reason. Aronowitz' account contains a good summation of the important chapter on Nietzsche in The Destruction of Reason. 'Despite Nietzsche's vehement denial that he has created a philosophical system, Lukács asserts that his apparent disparate comments, cloaked as aphorisms, constitute a definite system of thought … that looks both backward and forward to an era when there existed a "dictatorship of an elite".' (58-9) However despite its many positive elements the essay is marred by certain inaccuracies: Aronowitz reproduces, for example, the rather worn trope of how Hegel believed 'the Prussian State marked the end of human history since it had achieved the identity of subject and object'(57) – something which Hegel clearly did not believe.
The aesthetic section of the book begins with Peter Uwe Hohendahl's examination the debate which took place between Lukács and Adorno on literary theory. Adorno approved of Lukács early work but criticised fiercely his later 'dogmatic' notion of 'realism' in the period after Lukács became a Marxist, but Hohendahl suggests a stronger relational identity between the two thinkers than is commonly assumed. However Hohendahl also provides an effective account of Adorno's defence of Modernism and Lukács' rejection of it.
Werner Jung's essay explores Lukács account of literature in the modern age in terms of totality, its loss, and the frenetic pace of capitalism which creates a 'permanent becoming' (101) in the artistic forms which mediate it. These are important Lukácian premises and vital to his aesthetic, however Jung's prose is torturous to the point of being almost indecipherable.
Unfortunately Norman Arthur Fischer's expansive and clearly deeply researched article on the Lukácian analysis of Walter Scott also suffers from a lack of precision and murkiness which blunts its theoretical edge. Fischer introduces what he calls 'fusion' which purports to 'measure the extent and nature of the identification that a character in a historical novel … has with the larger ethical and political goals, problems or feelings of their time … the more identification there is, the more fusion there is.' (131) But at the same time 'fusion' is independent of 'a right, centre or left political stance'. (132) How can such 'identification' or 'fusion' not be a political question? How is such 'fusion' measured? These questions are hardly addressed.
Janos Kelemen's essay on Lukács as literary historian is interesting and impressive for it tries to place Lukács' aesthetic in the broader context of his historical-philosophical outline – 'history as a whole is none other than the self-realisation of the spirit, man's becoming man, and the process whereby human capacities are fulfilled … world literature as a whole must verify it.' (113) This essay contains an incisive consideration of Dante's Inferno with regards to its historical position as the transitional moment between two historical periods which was expressed, according to Lukács, as "the union of the conditions of the epic and the novel". (quoted 118)
Last but not least is Katie Terakis' excellent essay, 'Living Form and Living Criticism.' Terakis is a vibrant, powerful writer who, in this essay, concentrates on the early Lukács' Soul and Form and shows how already latent within this work are the elements and concerns which would come to shape his future literary outlook. 'Lukács affirms that he is also a product and an agent of the culture to which he is so hostile. This insight, which will be incorporated into his concept of totality, becomes the very crux of Lukács aesthetic theory … to confront the adversity and atomization of modern society.' (215-6) Terakis also provides a vivid, shocking but entirely persuasive account of the way modern academia has been 'reified' in the true Lukacian sense. 'Thinkers are beset with the need to strive frenetically for publication, opportunities and the recognition of small groups of specialists … the recognition of small groups of specialists … competitiveness, intrigue, social isolation and hothouse cultivation is the norm.' (222)

22 January 2012

Tony Mckenna
Tony Mckenna is a Hegelian-Marxist philosopher who has written for Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, Monthly Review and New Left Project among others

The Return of Fukuyama

From the Marx and Philosophy Review of Books   Francis Fukuyama The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 2011. 585 pp., $35.00/£25.00 hb ISBN 9780374227340

Reviewed by Peter Stone

Francis Fukuyama is best known for his first book, The End of History and the Last Man (1992), in which he argued that history had come to an end. He came to this conclusion via the philosophy of Hegel, as interpreted by Alexander Kojève. Fukuyama's new book, The Origins of Political Order, is just as ambitious as its predecessor. And like its predecessor, it is a very Hegelian book – incredibly ambitious in its scope and full of interesting insights, but not quite able to live up to its ambitions. Fortunately, however, Fukuyama's Hegelianism extends only so far, The Origins of Political Order is an easy read.

The first installment of a projected two-volume treatise, The Origins of Political Order seeks to explain the emergence of the modern political system, which Fukuyama believes is characterized by three features – the state, the rule of law, and accountability (15). Fukuyama adopts a Weberian understanding of a modern state, "an organization deploying a legitimate monopoly of violence over a defined territory", which is "subject to a rational division of labor, based on technical specialization and expertise, and impersonal both with regard to recruitment and their authority over citizens" (450). Such an organization is difficult to develop and sustain over time. After all, most of the world did not develop modern states satisfying this definition until the past few centuries, significant parts of the world are struggling to build such states today, and even well-established states are hardly perfect embodiments of the ideal. (Describe U.S. climate change policy as reflecting a "rational division of labor, based on technical specialization and expertise" with a straight face. Go on, I dare you.)

The reason why state development and maintenance proves so difficult is that it requires restraining some of the most deeply ingrained parts of human nature. Human beings, Fukuyama notes, are deeply social, not individualistic, at heart. We are designed by natural selection to live in small-scale extended family units. Within these units, cooperation is sustained through the mechanisms of kin selection (I cooperate with you because we are related) and reciprocal altruism (I cooperate with you because you have cooperated with me in the past, and may do so again in the future) (30). We have inherited these mechanisms from our predecessors in the animal world, and so our earliest ancestors lived in family groupings not dissimilar to theirs. But no vertebrate animal associates with other members of its species in societies numbering millions, as the modern state makes possible. This is not a coincidence. For the impersonal administration of the modern state works directly against the mechanisms of kin selection and reciprocal altruism. When sentencing a defendant, the members of a jury should not ask questions like, "How closely related am I to this guy?" or, "What has he done for me lately?" Needless to say, this impersonality is often a very desirable part of social institutions.

Modern states thus use mechanisms of cooperation very different from those employed in more small-scale forms of social organization. In a sense, these new mechanisms are "quite unnatural" (44), but it would be more accurate to say that they structure human interaction differently, thereby overcoming the parts of our nature that can stand in the way of the full development of our potential. In this respect, the modern state functions much like the scientific world. The rules followed by scientists (double-blind experiments, the demand for replication, the sharing of data, etc.) are intended to counteract certain natural human cognitive biases (the confirmation bias, for example). Those biases are useful in certain circumstances; they make it possible for us to act quickly and decisively in situations where careful deliberation would prove dangerous or counterproductive. But those biases impede the sustained accumulation of reliable knowledge, and so there is a need for institutions which control them. And like the modern state, the scientific community is devilishly hard to get off the ground, which is why its emergence took so long a time in coming. (Its future may seem more secure than that of the modern state, but that's only if you ignore the Michele Bachmanns of the world.)

Modern state formation, then, is all about overcoming "patrimonialism", or "the natural human propensity to favor family and friends" (17). Patrimonialism powerfully resists efforts to create states governed by impersonal rules, and it constantly stands ready to reassert itself if those states should falter (e.g., after the collapse of the Roman Empire). Fukuyama takes to task those who fail to understand the nature of this problem. For example, he criticizes those on the Left who glorify stateless communities governed by "mutual aid" (Kropotkin comes to mind). Far from embodying the realm of freedom, such communities offer their own form of tyranny – the "tyranny of cousins," in which one's entire life is controlled by the expectations of family and friends (the phrase originates with Ernest Gellner) (54). Even worse are those who attempt to create cooperative communities without recognizing the need for kinship selection and reciprocal altruism to sustain them. In effect, this is what Mao did when he "forced millions of unrelated peasants into collective farms" with tragic results (65).

But Fukuyama is just as critical of the Right as he is of the Left. "Many parts of sub-Saharan Africa," he notes, "are a libertarian's paradise" (13). The right-wing dream of eliminating the state – as embodied in Grover Norquist's wish to shrink the U.S. government to the point where it can be drowned in a bathtub – does not magically lead to a world governed by market relations. At best, it leads to the tyranny of cousins in small communities, which at least has the virtue of being semi-egalitarian. At worst, it leads to the domination of the weak by the strong, as less powerful tribes are constantly under threat of death or enslavement by the warlords of more powerful ones. (An unkind observer might suggest that this is precisely the kind of world Norquist really wants.) "Political institutions," Fukuyama writes,

are necessary and cannot be taken for granted. A market economy and high levels of wealth don't magically appear when you "get government out of the way;" they rest on a hidden institutional foundation of property rights, rule of law, and basic political order. A free market, a vigorous civil society, the spontaneous "wisdom of crowds" are all important components of a working democracy, but none can ultimately replace the functions of a strong, hierarchical government. (13-14)

Restraining the modern state is indeed essential for real freedom, but it is equally essential for there to be a modern state in need of restraint. Neither condition can be taken for granted.

The modern state does not naturally generate such restraint. As Fukuyama notes, "many of the elements of what we now understand to be a modern state were already in place in China in the third century B.C." (19), and yet the Chinese state also provided the model for so-called "Oriental despotism" (93). True political success requires a modern state tempered by both "the rule of law" and "accountability". Fukuyama's account of these two features of modern political development is not always clear, but essentially both function to "limit the state's power, first by forcing it to use its power according to certain public and transparent rules, and then by ensuring that it is subordinate to the will of the people" (15). Achieving this requires a civil society that is strong and well-organized, but not so strong as to overwhelm and overpower the state. If the latter occurs, the result is repatrimonialization, as well-organized private groups manipulate the state to benefit themselves. Fukuyama summarizes this conclusion as follows:

successful liberal democracy requires both a state that is strong, unified, and able to enforce laws on its own territory, and a society that is strong and cohesive and able to impose accountability on the state. It is the balance between a strong state and a strong society that makes democracy work, not just in seventeenth-century England but in contemporary developed democracies as well. (479)

The Tea Party's ravings notwithstanding, the primary threat to contemporary developed democracies is not state tyranny, but state weakness, "contemporary democracies become too easily gridlocked and rigid, and thus unable to make difficult decisions to ensure their long-term economic and political survival" (482).

The broad outline of this story is quite compelling, and Fukuyama explores a vast range of national cases – China, India, the Ottoman Empire, England, France, Spain, Poland, Hungary, Russia, even Denmark – to make his point. But can he convincingly account for all these examples? On the one hand, he claims that "A very simple model can explain this variance, which has to do with the balance of power among only four groups of political actors" – the king, the nobles, the gentry, and the middle class or "Third Estate" (422). "The outcome", he continues, "of these struggles depended largely on the collective action that any of these major actors could achieve" (424). But on the other hand, Fukuyama continually complicates his own story, introducing more and more factors influencing the development of political order, so that in the end the big picture becomes increasingly hazy.

The resulting narrative makes huge political changes hinge on extreme contingencies. Early modern Russia developed an absolute monarchy. Early modern Hungary and Poland grew weaker and weaker, until their neighbors simply carved them up like turkeys. What accounts for this difference? It's hard to say. Fukuyama does point out that "the growth of a powerful state in the principality of Moscow was aided greatly by the fact that the founding dynasty consistently produced male heirs up through the end of the sixteenth century. Hungary, by contrast, faced repeated succession struggles due to its short-lived dynasties and the foreign origin of many of its kings." This required each Hungarian would-be monarch to make concessions to the nobles; these concessions built up over time until the monarchy's residual power was virtually nil (380-1). But ten pages later, Fukuyama writes, "Here, then, is one critical difference between Russia and Hungary. In Russia, the middle service class was recruited to work directly for the Muscovite state, whereas in Hungary it was incorporated into the noble class. This choice was probably sufficient to determine the subsequent paths of centralization and decentralization taken by the two societies" (391). What's really driving this story? It's very hard to tell.

In the end, what Fukuyama offers "amounts to something less than a predictive theory of political development. A parsimonious theory of political change, comparable to the theories of economic growth posited by economists, is in my view simply not possible" (23). This is a perfectly sensible thing to say; one doesn't need to read Hegel to know that life is complicated. But it makes plain just what The Origins of Political Order can deliver. It cannot, and does not, provide a clear story explaining just how the modern world got to be the way it is. But it can and does identify a number of critically important causal mechanisms that impact the way human institutions develop, sustain themselves, and die out. Those who are ignorant of these mechanisms have caused an enormous amount of suffering, and so anyone seeking to build a better world would do well to take them into account. This is a valuable enough lesson to justify reading even a book as large of The Origins of Political Order. It's probably not a grand enough lesson to impress Hegel, but then again Hegel didn't deliver everything he promised either.

22 January 2012

 

About the reviewer:  Peter Stone

Peter Stone is Ussher Lecturer in Political Science (Political Theory) at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of The Luck of the Draw: The Role of Lotteries in Decision Making (Oxford University Press, 2011) and the editor of Lotteries in Public Life: A Reader (Imprint Academic, 2011). He is a regular contributor to the blog Equality by Lot

"Hedges makes a valuable contribution" says Parenti

"An Opinon About the Opinion-Makers" by Michael Parenti

 

Jill Pletcher and Mary Magnuson (two of my favorite FB people) were speculating as to what might be my opinion of Chris Hedges. I think Hedges makes a valuable contribution. He goes over issues and topics that some of us have dealt with for many years. It is familiar terrain but also nice to have a fresh verve injected into it, the enthusiasm of the recent convert. Plus he brings his own idiom and experience to it.

I differ from him in regard to his view (resembling Michael Moore's view) that capitalism "has lost its way." As that argument goes, earlier capitalism was okay but this corporate monster has become something that cannot be countenanced, etc. I agree of course that it is a corporate monster but I also think that earlier capitalism was pretty rotten in its own way: y'know, 8-year-old kids working 14-hour-days, widespread typhoid epidemics, massive underemployment, starvation wages, etc.

Perhaps Hedges and Moore are thinking about capitalism after WW II, with the postwar prosperity and "historical compromise" with labor. In that case, their argument is a little more understandable but it still does not hold, since even then the 1% was at war with the 99%, albeit with less of the systematic confidence and brutal persistence displayed today.

Also, Jill wrote, "Dr. Michael Parenti would wholeheartedly support Hedges comments on Yugoslavia." That surprised me. In Hedges' early book about war correspondence, as I recall, he supported the destructive war against Yugoslavia which broke that country into a cluster of shattered, right-wing, mini republics where everything is privatized and deregulated and (almost) everyone is poor. Hedges just couldn't stop demonizing the Serbs and Milosevic in that most ill-informed but de rigueur way that does shore up one's legitimacy with the liberal centrists.

Maybe Jill is referring to a more recent opinion of Hedges. I hear that some people on the left ,who stood shoulder to shoulder with NATO, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House (Clinton) in delivering death and destruction on Yugoslavia, now are having second thoughts. Maybe Hedges is one of them. I wonder how he stands on Libya.

In any case more important than what I think about this or that other left commentator is what do YOU think about what is being said. Fashioning a reasoned argument is always a superior path to political liberation (both mental and collective) than embracing the latest name as the authoritative source. I am happy to say that people like Jill and Mary keep all of us on our toes as they forge ahead, determined to make sense out of the madness.

It's a Little Nell kind of world

http://bit.ly/yEj4yl

 

Dickens 'more relevant than ever' in Britain

Monday 06 February 2012

In the run-up to the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens's birth tomorrow his biographer Claire Tomalin warned that the great novelist's depiction of injustice in society was still "amazingly relevant."

Ms Tomalin said Dickens's portrayal of the proletariat still resonated in modern Britain.

"You only have to look around our society and everything he wrote in the 1840s is still relevant - the great gulf between rich and poor, corrupt financiers and members of Parliament, how the country is run by old Etonians - you name it, he said it," she said.

"The world did become a much better place in postwar England. Attlee's government brought in the National Health Service. There was free university education for children of all classes.

"But now our health system is deteriorating, we do not have free university education and we have never been so divided."

Events taking place to mark Dickens's birthday include a street party in the road where he was born in Portsmouth and a wreath-laying ceremony at his grave at Westminster Abbey.

 

 

An exercise program combined with political education

The fundamentals of health and fitness for African revolutionaries

By Khairi Akili, Mujaa (X) and Terah

Published Jan 24, 2012

 
Members of ReGYMental fitness exercise in a park.

As technology-induced inactivity combines with the chemical and biological warfare of the food industry, we have seen a significant increase in obesity, particularly in the African community in the U.S.

To combat this, we are engaging our community through ReGYMental Fitness as the platform for retooling the perspectives of health and fitness with the understanding that the body and mind are gyms unto themselves.

Inspired by other groups, such as The Bartendaz, The RBG Fit Club and our ancestors who stayed in shape and maintained a state of readiness before there were such things as gym memberships, we have honed our focus on four areas of practice. These are organic fitness, vegan/raw diets, yoga and self-defense training.

An exercise program combined with political education

Organic Fitness is defined by a program of reshaping the physique without the need for expensive equipment or a gym membership. Every exercise we do involves our own body weight.

The equipment can be found at most city parks or can be modified for nearly any location. We get creative. This is an outdoor workout that comes with its own benefits and risks, which will be explained later.

A vegan/raw diet is promoted to eliminate the immense hazards of processed food and meat bi-products and to also boost energy levels by eating as many live foods as possible.

This affects all areas of health, fitness and life in general. You will be amazed at the transformations that your body and mind go through with a change in eating habits.

Yoga is our method of increasing flexibility, core strength, posture and mental clarity. The practice opens up the range of motion and with increased flexibility unlocks muscle capacity.

Core strength and posture add stabilization to the body while aiding proper breathing. Mental clarity not only increases problem solving ability but also allows us to use our bodies in the most efficient manner when called upon.

The final practice we have focused on is self-defense training. We have found it vital in honing discipline, fluidity of movement and acquiring basic techniques to defend self, family and community.

When it comes to this, discipline is everything. It is the underlying foundation of all work and success.

Martial arts/sciences are a means of actualizing static power and we view defense as the hidden concept that brings full effectiveness to the trinity of Food, Clothing and Shelter.

ReGYMental Fitness is available five days a week and the people can come and go as they please.

For our more dedicated members, we have compiled a book and media list, which are used for discussion when we come together once a week, in an effort to further fortify the political education of our members while we strengthen our bodies.

The benefits of outdoor exercise

Many have asked us, "Why exercise outdoors?" Although this question has many answers, the most important are: it is widely available and it's FREE! Not everyone has access or resources for a gym membership but with our Organic Fitness regimen, you carry most of the gym with you and with a little creativity, you can find many everyday places to work out.

Being outside also provides you a fresher supply of air and vitamin D from sunlight exposure, which strengthens your bones and builds your immune system.

Recently, scientists have concluded that exercising outdoors will improve your energy level, decrease stress and can even be used as a treatment for depression.

There are risks involved in any workout and being outdoors comes with its own.

Training in the elements requires some getting used to, and temperature extremes can put extra stress on the body. Be sure to dress for the weather.

In the cold, dress in layers and protect your hands, ears and feet with gloves, hats and thick socks.

In the heat, make sure you have plenty of water, dress in loose, light-colored clothing and try to exercise in the early morning or evening.

Most importantly, always listen to your body. If you don't feel well, stop.

Remember: Health is wealth. We must invest in ourselves. The children are watching. Be an example.

The authors of this article are cofounders of ReGYMental, a Norfolk, Virginia-based organization aimed at resolving health issues in the African community. Members of ReGYMental also distribute The Burning Spear Newspaper in the Norfolk area.