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Jay Rothermel
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Saturday, October 30, 2010
Book Review: No Easy Victories
by: Gerald Horne
No Easy Victories: African Liberation and American Activists over a Half Century, 1950-2000
Edited by William Minter, Gail Hovey, and Charles Cobb Jr.
Trenton: Africa World Press, 2008.
Solidarity Forever?
No Easy Victories is a remarkable and often insightful collection of essays and reflections, many of which have been penned by those who played leading roles in the dramatic story of how a conservative hegemon--the United States--was compelled to retreat somewhat in its support for colonialism and apartheid during the second half of the twentieth century. The numerous photographs alone make this book well worth the price and underscores how this book, inter alia, is a valuable document.
It is because of this book that I came to discover that a man I have known as a friend--Robert Van Lierop, the attorney and filmmaker who produced the wonderful documentary, A Luta Continua (1971)--had a grandfather who had participated in the so-called Boer War over one century ago in South Africa, while his father, who was a merchant seaman, visited there. The Van Lierops, who are of Surinamese descent, are worthy of a book all their own, yet for the time being his contribution to this worthy volume must suffice.
In her finely crafted essay in the book, Lisa Brock reminds us of the legacy bequeathed to us by the Council on African Affairs, which, beginning in the 1930s until its unfortunate and untimely demise in the 1950s hounded out of existence by the bloodhounds of the Red Scare, held high the banner of anticolonialism in Africa. Their leader, Paul Robeson, once shared a London flat with Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta, while their intellectual inspiration, W. E. B. Du Bois, was invited to settle in Ghana by his pupil, Kwame Nkrumah.
It is because of this book that I was made to recall the enormous contributions that figures like Harry Belafonte and Peter and Cora Weiss have made to the cause of progressive humanity for decades. Belafonte, who is still active at a time when lesser mortals have chosen comfortable retirement, helped to make Martin Luther King Jr. the icon he is today and, likewise, contributed heavily to the success of Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba. The Weisses helped to bring attention to nations like Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau--and not least their leaders Eduoardo Mondlane and Amilcar Cabral--at a time when, sadly, many of their compatriots could find neither on a map. Peter Weiss, in addition to being a major philanthropist for African causes, also has been a pioneering lawyer, creatively applying international human rights standards in notoriously parochial U.S. courts. Cora Weiss, in addition to her humanitarian efforts, has been a stalwart of the movement against nuclear weapons.
It is because of this book that I was reacquainted with old friends like Gay McDougall, who still bestrides the planet like a Colossus and who was standing alongside Nelson Mandela when he cast his first vote. This book also reminds us of the gargantuan contributions of Randall Robinson, who built TransAfrica into a major force in Washington, D.C., and continues to write best-selling books that force us to engage with issues that some would prefer to forget, such as reparations for the ravages of slavery and colonialism.
This book also reminded me of figures I had forgotten--sadly enough--such as the late Congressman Charles Diggs, who was a legislative lion in opposition to apartheid, and Goler Butcher, who before her tragic death, was one of the most skilled international lawyers in the United States. And, this book also made me recollect the pivotal role played by Julius Nyerere, who at immense cost to his nation and his own security, opened wide the doors of Tanzania not only to opponents of colonialism in Africa but also to opponents of white supremacy in the United States, a group that included a host of Black Panthers who continue to reside in southeast Africa. The priceless memories of the African American activist Sylvia Hill, recalling in this book the Pan-African Congress that took place in Dar es Salaam in 1974, will provide an important building block for the fortunate historian who chooses to write about this important ideological turning point in the history of Pan-Africanism.
This book compels us to recall connections that still need to be contemplated, for example, that between Namibians and the Lutheran Church, and the critical role played by the union of stevedores, headquartered in San Francisco, whose reluctance to move cargo headed for the land of apartheid was a turning point in U.S. labor's engagement with Africa. This book also has considerable information on the all-important 'divestment' movement that swept U.S. campuses from the 1960s through the 1990s. This decentralized movement involved students protesting the fact that colleges routinely included in their endowments investments in corporations that had holdings in apartheid South Africa. Forcing them to 'divest' was a mighty blow on behalf of liberation and was also a model of how to galvanize a national movement in a vast and conservative nation that stretches three thousand miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific--then two thousand miles more to encompass Hawaii and hundreds of miles more to ensnare Alaska.
Still, as U.S. imperialism continues to play an outsized role in Africa, magnetically pushing states away from public sector remedies to deep-seated problems for fear of angering Washington which has converted privatization and the mythical 'market' into a latter-day god, it remains important to provide a critical examination, even of those who so heroically have opposed Washington's policies. Thus, members of this list should be alert to the fact that the title notwithstanding, this book focuses heavily and disproportionately on the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Zimbabwe receives short shrift, for example. This may be part of an inadvertent process of creating a historic narrative of this topic and this period with Mandela on one side of the Atlantic, coupled majestically with George Houser--a Euro-American founder and leader of the American Committee on Africa (ACOA)--on the other side. A problem with this story is that it does not frontally engage the sharp ideological and political combat that determined the final outcome.
During the time of the liberation struggle in Zimbabwe, for example, the party of Robert Mugabe, now the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), received substantial support not only from a critical mass of U.S.-based Black Nationalists, but also from many of the Euro-American left who were heartened by its closeness to China; concomitantly, many of these same forces were not particularly fond of Joshua Nkomo's the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU), because of the perception that it was overly close to the former Soviet Union. I recall vividly a planning meeting in early 1980 to plan a fundraising concert for Zimbabwe just before the first democratic elections. There was sharp contestation with a considerable number of people demanding that all the proceeds go to ZANU (the eventual decision was a 50-50 split between this party and ZAPU). Inevitably, the perception that ZANU was close to China and represented 'true' Black Nationalism proved decisive in the minds of some. Similarly, before these elections, 'activists' of a different sort--Euro-American mercenaries--flocked to the then Rhodesia in the hundreds (perhaps the thousands) to combat African liberation. As private sector mercenary firms, such as 'Blackwater,' capture headlines because of their depredations in Iraq, it would have been informative if this volume had noted their historical predecessors.
As we now know, Mugabe and Co. emerged triumphant in these 1980 elections, as did China in its struggle with the Soviet Union, which has disappeared. Zimbabwe's present political stance has attracted numerous foes in the North Atlantic with Mugabe's presence almost wrecking a summit between the African Union and the European Union (EU) in Lisbon in December 2007. One of the reasons that the EU chose not to pull out of this gathering despite Mugabe's presence is because of the fear that this boycott would only serve to deepen Beijing's already ramified ties with the beleaguered continent of Africa. I think that one of the many reasons that South Africa has not heeded the cries of many calling for a crackdown on the Mugabe regime is because of a justifiable apprehension of crossing swords with the leading regional ally, Zimbabwe, of the planet's rising power: China. Clearly, China and one of its closest African allies, Mugabe's Zimbabwe, will be major factors, respectively, globally and in Southern Africa, for some time to come, and it would have been useful to have received in this book needed historical background and context on these pressing matters.
The same holds true for Angola. The authors do make reference to the mid-1970s crisis in the run-up to independence from Portugal when some in the United States opposed the ultimately triumphant faction, the MPLA, which continues to lead the government in Luanda. Again, some U.S.-based Black Nationalists and others influenced by Beijing opposed the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertacao de Angola) because of its perceived closeness to Moscow. This contretemps helped to split the then vibrant African Liberation Support Committee, which had mobilized thousands, particularly in New York City and Washington, D.C.
Yet, the most lengthy and comprehensive essay in this estimable collection chastises the 'Angolan government' since it 'made little or no effort to reach out to U.S. civil society or even to Africa activists' (p. 47). Likewise, it is asserted that 'the Angolan government never established a working relationship with its potential supporters in the United States' (p. 35). First of all, Luanda may have had justifiable suspicion of 'U.S. civil society,' since a considerable portion of this amorphous entity backed Angola's mortal domestic opponents on grounds that, in retrospect, seem either shady or specious. A little digging would have revealed that Holden Roberto, one of the key leaders of these vigorous anticommunist forces in Angola and responsible for the slayings of countless MPLA cadre, had enjoyed a long history with 'U.S. civil society,' including some who are otherwise treated heroically in these pages.
Moreover, I should mention that a casual browser in the collections of the New York Public Library will find a pamphlet I edited in solidarity with the MPLA during these tumultuous times--entitled 'The Facts on Angola'--which was intended to bolster this party in its struggle against U.S. imperialism, apartheid, Roberto (and Jonas Savimbi), and, of course, Maoist China. I had no problem gaining access to the MPLA representative at the United Nations at that juncture, Elisio de Figueiredo, who emerged as his nation's first ambassador to the United States.
Of course, I did this political work in conjunction with the awkwardly named National Anti-Imperialist Movement in Solidarity with African Liberation, which was similarly perceived as being overly close to the Communist Party in the United States. This organization, which maintained a special relationship to those viewed as allied to Moscow--which, as it turns out, were most of the leading forces in Southern Africa--goes unmentioned in these pages. Similarly, I recall a well-attended meeting in Harlem in the 1980s to hear an address by South African Communist Party leader, Moses Mabhida. Likewise, I recall hosting South African Communist leader Chris Hani during a visit to Los Angeles in the early 1990s. (In retrospect, it seems that the event in which I hosted Hani was spied on illicitly by a so-called 'rogue' San Francisco police officer working in tandem with right-wing forces; this was the subject of major litigation that I trust South African investigators will note if ever Hani's assassination is accorded a proper investigation.) There is no mention of the epochal 1981 solidarity conference at Manhattan's Riverside Church, perhaps because U.S. Communists were perceived as playing a leading role, though, in fact, there was a broad constellation of forces at work led by the exceedingly competent Trinidadian-American lawyer, Lennox Hinds, who went on to play a leading role in Mandela's post-1990 rhapsodically received visit to the United States.
Neither Mabhida nor Hani are mentioned in these pages (nor is Hinds), which is fair enough--the book states clearly that it is not meant to be comprehensive--but it fudges the issue by sniping at previous histories for not being comprehensive. The editors assert early on, 'when we began working on this project, we were motivated in large part by our dissatisfaction with existing accounts of the period' (p. x). However, for those seeking to understand contemporary reality--which is part of the purpose of reading history like this in the first place--one can close this book unprepared to comprehend how, for example, Communist-influenced forces played a pivotal role in December 2007 in dislodging a sitting president, Thabo Mbeki, as leader of the African National Congress. Or, for that matter, one is unprepared to comprehend how Mbeki and his challenger, Jacob Zuma, are both former Communists trained in the former Soviet Union with the latter's Russian reportedly being quite fluent. Charlene Mitchell, an African American Communist, is highlighted, but African solidarity was not her primary portfolio (though it would have been useful if, in the pages devoted to her, she had been asked about a journey she made to Congo-Brazzaville during the height of the Cold War when this nation was going through a Marxist phase of leadership; indeed, attention to so-called Francophone Africa is scant in these pages). The contemporary Russian scholar, Vladimir Shubin, has written at length about Moscow's considerable support for African liberation (for instance in his ANC: a view from Moscow (Bellville, South Africa: Mayibuye, 1999), and, again, as Moscow revives once more under the leadership of Vladmir Putin and seems destined to continue playing a major role in global affairs, it would have been helpful to readers to provide the relevant historical background for Soviet initiatives in Africa.
Yet, the activist who receives the fullest treatment in these pages, George Houser, acknowledges his anticommunism, and to the credit of this volume, it is pointed out that his organization--the ACOA--was propelled into existence not least as an outgrowth of the fierce governmental assault on the Council on African Affairs, led by the prodigious leftists, Paul Robeson and W. B. E. Du Bois. Unfortunately, the reader does not receive much assistance in comprehending how it was that socialist-oriented organizations in Africa came to receive considerable support in the citadel of anticommunism, the United States. Part of the answer rests in the fact that African Americans--who were not as captivated by conservatism--were the bulwark of the movement in solidarity with Africa.
Again, unfortunately, this volume underestimates the support that the anticolonial resistance in Kenya received during the most frigid period of the Cold War, the 1950s. We are told that with rare exception there 'was virtually no analysis or criticism of the war' in East Africa (p. 19). This is simply not true. The Kenyan labor leader, Tom Mboya, first visited the United States in 1956 at a time when the Suez crisis marked the beginning of the end of British colonial rule, as Moscow was threatening to rain rockets down on London. Subsequently, Mboya appeared on U.S. national television--perhaps the first African to do so--and was on the cover of the major newsweeklies, rubbed shoulders with both John F. Kennedy (from whom he was able to obtain considerable sums for an airlift of students to matriculate at U.S. universities, one of whom was his Luo comrade, Barack Obama Sr.) and Richard M. Nixon, and received maximum financial support from the U.S. labor movement. Mboya also spoke eloquently and at length about Africans' outrage at the maltreatment of African Americans--a factor that separates him conspicuously from the bulk of his Southern African counterparts who, too often, were notoriously silent on this bedrock issue. This synergistic relationship between Africans and African Americans redounded to the benefit of both, a fact that too should have received more attention in these pages.
It is evident that another factor which spurred the existence of the ACOA was the apocalyptic reaction to 'Mau Mau' in the North Atlantic community. There was a real fear that it might signify a final reckoning when the myriads of sins committed over the centuries by white supremacy and colonialism, including the slave trade and land expropriation, were finally meeting the retribution they so richly deserved. As things turned out, thousands of Africans were slain--and a few dozen Europeans (as they were termed accurately then)--but that reality should not be allowed to obscure the real hysteria that put colonialism and white supremacy decisively on the back foot.
One cannot separate the popularity of the Swahili language in black America--including the manufactured holiday that is Kwanzaa--from the resonance struck by Kenya beginning in the 1950s. Likewise, the confluence of the Suez crisis with 'Mau Mau' led to more attention to the chief victim of the joint British-French-Israeli aggression: Egypt. This, in turn, gave a boost to the Nation of Islam in the United States, an indigenous nationalist-oriented religious formation that was born decades earlier but only began to gain traction when the organized left (Robeson, Du Bois, and others) were in retreat. Similarly, the U.S.-born philosophy known as 'Afro-centrism' could easily be termed 'Egypt-centrism,' which is a direct manifestation of this growing fascination with Cairo. 'Mau Mau' was studied extensively by Medgar Evers, a leading African American martyr of the movement for whom a college in New York City is named; he named one of his children after Kenyatta, Kenya's leader, and along with his brother, contemplated the founding of a 'Mau Mau' in Mississippi, the heart of darkness where he was born. Malcolm X, who was catapulted to prominence as a result of his association with the Nation of Islam, had called for a 'Mau Mau' in Harlem.
How African militancy inspired the same militancy in Black America is largely an untold story in these pages. In part, it stems from the orientation, which emphasizes the ACOA, students, and religious elements, and does not give sufficient attention to, for example, Black Nationalists and Marxists of various stripes. Thus, when Patrice Lumumba was slain, a group of African Americans invaded the inner sanctum of the United Nations in protest. The gripping film, The Battle of Algiers (1965), is still a staple in Black America and inspired the Black Panther Party, which established an outpost in Algeria and continues to have members exiled in Tanzania.
It would have been worthwhile, as well, if this book had pointed out one of the major problems with the solidarity organizations based in Washington, D.C. (as opposed to New York City): their often problematic relationship to the political establishment. At times, activists joked that instead of these organizations lobbying on our behalf in Washington, D.C., they lobbied us on behalf of Washington, D.C.--that is, as if to say, 'Congress will not simply accept your demands, please accept half a loaf.' Most of the time, they would be ignored and would be sent back to Congress with renewed instructions, but at times, this 'reverse lobbying' prevailed.
Another weakness of this trans-Atlantic movement was that when movements came to power, instead of tending to and nurturing solidarity movements that boosted them, they instead abandoned them, discarding them as if they were soiled paper napkins, thereby weakening these newly founded governments' attempt to influence Washington. This was a strategic blunder of monumental proportion to the extent that it merits an intensive study grounded in multiple archives.
Nevertheless, the words with which I opened this review should be emphasized--this is a highly valuable volume--and any reservations expressed here are far outweighed by this fact. It belongs in every library in Africa--and, most of all, in South Africa. Still, in its very strength it exposes an entire realm of research that has yet to be completed.
Existentialism: a Marxist view
by Georg Lukács
(translated from the German by Henry F. Mins)
Tout se passe comme si le monde,
l'homme et l’homme dans le monde
n’arrivaient a réaliser qu’un Dieu
manqué.—SARTRE, L’Etre et le néant
There is no reasonable doubt that existentialism will soon become the predominant philosophical current among bourgeois intellectuals. This state of affairs has been long in the making. Ever since the publication of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit the avant-garde intellectuals have seen in existentialism the philosophy of our times. In Germany, Jaspers undertook to communicate the principles of the new philosophy to broader sections of the educated public. During the war and since its end, the tide of existentialism rolled over the entire Western cultural field, and the leading German existentialists and their precursor, Husserl, have made great conquests in France and in America—not only in the United States but in Latin America as well. In 1943 the basic work of western existentialism appeared, Sartre’s big book cited above; and since then existentialism has been pressing forward irresistibly, through philosophical debates, special periodicals (Les Temps Modernes), novels, and dramas.
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1. Method as Attitude
Is all this a passing fad—perhaps one which may last a few years? Or is it really an epoch-making new philosophy? The answer depends on how accurately the new philosophy reflects reality, and how adequately it deals with the crucial human question with which the age is faced.
An epoch-making philosophy has never yet arisen without a really original method. This was so for all the great philosophers of the past, Plato and Aristotle, Descartes and Spinoza, Kant and Hegel. What is the originality of existentialism’s method? The question is not settled by referring to the fact that existentialism is an offshoot of Husserl’s philosophy. It is important to note that modern phenomenology is one of the numerous philosophical methods which seek to rise above both idealism and materialism by discovering a philosophical "third way," by making intuition the true source of knowledge. From Nietzsche through Mach and Avenarius to Bergson and beyond, the mass of bourgeois philosophy goes this way. Husserl’s intuition of essence (Wesensschau) is but one strand of the development.
This would not in itself be a decisive argument against the phenomenological method. If we are to arrive at a correct judgment, we must first understand the philosophical and topical significance of the "third way," as well as the place and function of intuition in the knowing process.
Is there any room for a "third way" besides idealism and materialism? If we consider this question seriously, as the great philosophers of the past did, and not with fashionable phrases, there can be only one answer, "No." For when we look at the relations which can exist between being and consciousness we see clearly that only two positions are possible: either being is primary (materialism), or consciousness is primary (idealism). Or, to put it another way, the fundamental principle of materialism is the independence of being from consciousness; of idealism, the dependence of being on consciousness. The fashionable philosophers of today establish a correlation between being and consciousness as a basis for their "third way": there is no being without consciousness and no consciousness without being. But the first assertion produces only a variant of idealism: the acknowledgnient of the dependence of being on consciousness.
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It was the grim reality of the imperialist period that forced the philosophical "third way" on bourgeois thinking: for only in becalmed, untroubled times can men hold themselves to be thorough-going idealists. When some students broke Fichte’s windows over a college quarrel Goethe said, smiling: "This is a very disagreeable way to take cognizance of the reality of the external world." The imperialist epoch gave us such window-breaking on a world-wide scale. Downright philosophical idealism gently faded out. Apart from some minor professorial philosophers, anyone who declares himself an idealist today feels hopeless about applying his philosophy to reality (Valery, Benda, etc.).
The abandonment of the old downright idealism had been anticipated even in the middle of the last century by petty-bourgeois asceticism. Ever since Nietzsche, the body (Leib) has played a leading role in bourgeois philosophy. The new philosophy needs formulae which recognize the primary reality of the body and the joys and dangers of bodily existence, without, however, making any concessions to materialism. For at the same time materialism was becoming the world view of the revolutionary proletariat. That made a position such as Gassendi and Hobbes look impossible for bourgeois thinkers. Although the method of idealism had been discredited by the realities of the time, its conclusions were held indispensable. This explains the need for the "third way" in the bourgeois world of the imperialist period.
The phenornenological method, especially after Husserl, believes it has discovered a way of knowing which exhibits the essence of objective reality without going beyond the human or even the individual consciousness. The intuition of essence is a sort of intuitive introspection, but is not psychologically oriented. It inquires rather what sort of objects the thought process posits, and what kind of intentional acts are involved. It was still relatively easy for Husserl to operate with these concepts, because he was concerned exclusively with questions of pure logic, i.e., pure acts and objects of thought. The question became more complex as Scheler took up problems of ethics and sociology, and Heidegger and Sartre broached the ultimate questions of philosophy. The need of the times which drove them in this direction was so compelling that it silenced all gnosiological doubts as to whether the method was adequate to objective reality.
Even when the phenomenologists dealt with crucial questions of
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social actuality, they put off the theory of knowledge and asserted that the phenomenological method suspends or "brackets" the question whether the intentional objects are real. The method was thus freed from any knowledge of reality. Once during the First World War Scheler visited me in Heidelberg, and we had an informing conversation on this subject. Scheler maintained that phenomenology was a universal method which could have anything for its intentional object. For example, he explained, phenomenological researches could be made about the devil; only the question of the devil’s reality would first have to be "bracketed." "Certainly," I answered. "and when when you are finished with the phenomenological picture of the devil, you open the brackets— and the devil in person is standing before you." Scheler laughed, shrugged his shoulders, and made no reply.
The arbitrariness of the method is seen especially when the question is raised: Is what phenomenological intuition finds actually real? What right does that intuition have to speak of the reality of its object? For Dilthey’s intuition, the colorfulness and the uniqueness of historical situations are the reality; for Bergson’s, it is the flow itself, the duration (durée), that dissolves the petrified forms of ordinary life; while for Husserl’s, the acts in which individual objects are meant constitute "reality"—objects which he treats as isolated units, with hard contours like statuary. Although mutually exclusive, these intuitions were able to dwell together in relative peace.
These interpretations of reality stem from factors even more concrete than the social need for a "third way." It is a general tendency of the imperialist period to regard social relationships as secondary circumstances which do not concern the essence of man. The intuition of essence takes the immediate givenness of inner experience as its starting point, which it regards as unconditioned and primary, never looking into its character and preconditions, and proceeds thence to its final abstract "vision," divorced from reality. Such intuitions, under the social conditions of the time, could easily abstract from all social actuality while keeping the appearance of utter objectivity and rigor. In this way there arose the logical myth of a world (in splendid accord with the attitude of bourgeois intellectuals) independent of consciousness, although its structure and characteristics are said to be determined by the individual consciousness.
lt is impossible here to give a detailed critique of the phenomeno-
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logical method. We shall therefore merely analyze in summary fashion an example of the way it is applied. We have chosen the book of Szilasi, the well known student of Husserl and Heidegger,1 partly because Szilasi is an earnest thinker who aims at scientific objectivity, not a cynical fabricator of myths like Scheler; and partly because the elementary form of the example is well suited to a brief treatment. Szilasi takes as his instance the co-presence (Miteinandersein) at his lecture of his hearers and himself. Describing the essence of the situation, he finds that the hall lies before him, the benches, in a word, the external world: "This space with its variously worked boards is a lecture hall only because we understand this mass of wooden objects as such, and we do understand it so because from the outset we mean it as something presupposed in our common task—namely, lecturing and listening." From which he concludes, "It is the way of being together that determines what the thing is."
Let us consider the result of this intuition of essence from the methodological point of view. First, it is a primitive abstraction when Szilasi speaks of "variously worked boards," and not of desks, benches, etc. But this is methodologically essential, for if he should concede that the lecture hall is equally adapted to holding philological, legal, and other lectures, what would be left of the magical potency of the intentional experience, which is supposed to make the object what it is?
However, what the analysis omits is still more important. The hall is in Zurich, and the time is the 1940’s. The fact that Szilasi could deliver a lecture precisely in Zurich has the most diverse social preconditions. For instance, before Hitler’s seizure of power Szilasi gave his lectures in Freiburg; after 1933 they were no longer permitted, in fact the lecturer had to leave Germany because his personal safety was threatened. Why is all this missing from the intuition of co-presence? It belongs there at least as much as do the "worked boards."
But let us return to the boards. The fact that boards are used in a certain way to make desks and benches presupposes a certain stage of development of industry and of society. Again, the fact that the boards and the ball as a whole are in a certain condition (is there coal for heating, or glass in the windows?) is inseparably connected with other social events and structures. But phenomenological method, excluding all social elements from its analysis, confronts consciousness with a chaos of things (and men) which only individual subjectivity can
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articulate and objectify. Here we have the well publicized phenomenological objectivity, the "third way," which turns out to be only a revival of Neo-Kantianism.
Phenomenology and the ontology deriving from it only seem to go beyond the gnosiological solipsism of subjective idealism. A formally new formulation of the question reinstates ontological idealism. It is no accident that (just as forty years ago the Machists reproached one another for idealism, each recognizing only himself as the discoverer of the philosophical "third way") today the existentialists make similar accusations against one another. So Sartre complains of Husserl and Heidegger, two men he otherwise prizes highly. Husserl, in his opinion, has not gone beyond Kant; and he criticizes Heidegger as follows: "The character being-together [co-presence, Mitsein] introduced by Heidegger is a character of the isolated ego. Hence it does not lead beyond solipsism. Therefore we shall search Sein und Zeit in vain for a position beyond both idealism and realism [meaning materialism] ." An analysis of Sartre’s philosophy will show us that he can be taxed with the offense for which he condemns Husserl and Heidegger. Heidegger's philosophy existence (Dasein) does not mean objective being (Sein) proper, but human existence, i.e., a being aware of existence. In some places Sartre, who has more interest than his predecessors in the emotional and practical relation of man to nature, spells out the complete dependence of nature on man s consciousness. When speaking of devastation, he denies that it exists in nature itself, in which oniy changes take place. "And even this expression is inadequate, for in order that this changing-to-something-else may be posited, a witness is needed who somehow or other preserves the past within himself and is able to compare it with the present in its ‘no-longer’ form." And in another place he says: "The full moon does not denote the future, except when we observe the waxing moon in the ‘world’ which reveals itself in human actuality: the future comes into the world by way of human existence."
This purely idealistic tendency is heightened in Sartre by the fact that his way of handling problems compels him to study concrete questions of co-existence (Mitsein) even more frequently than Heidegger. He meets the difficulty partly by choosing loosely connected manifestations of co-presence that can be referred with some plausibility to the inner experiences of the ego (a rendezvous at a café,
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a trip in the subway). But when actual social activity is involved (labor, class consciousness), he makes a methodological salto mortale and declares that the experiences of the relevant intuitions of essence are of psychological and not of ontological character. The reason for this is the secret of the initiate, those to whom the intuition of essence is granted. It is therefore no accident that when Sartre tests the relation of man to his fellow man he recognizes only the following relations as ontologically essential, that is, as elements of reality in itself: love, speech, masochism, indifference, longing, hate, and sadism. (Even the order of the categories is Sartre’s.) Anything beyond this in Miteinandersein, the categories of collective life together, of working together, of fighting in a common cause, is for Sartre, as we have seen, a category of consciousness (psychological) and not a really existent category (ontological).
When all this is applied to actual cases, the result is banal Philistine commonplaces. In his popular book Sartre takes up the question of how far he can have confidence in his freely acting comrades. Answer: "As far as I have immediate personal knowledge of them, to count on the unity and will of the party is just like counting on the streetcar to come on time, and on the train not to jump the tracks. But I cannot count on men that I do not know, banking on human goodness or man’s interest in the common good, for it is a given datum that man is free and there is no such thing as a human nature on which I can count." Apart from the involved terminology, any petty bourgeois, shrinking from public affairs, could, and does, say as much.
2. The Myth of Nothingness
Il est absurde que nous sommes nés,
il est absurde que nous mourrons.
—SARTRE, L’Etre et le néant
It would be an error to assume that such an abstract narrowing of reality, such an idealist distortion of the problem of reality, by intelligent and experienced men is intentional deceit. On the contrary, those inner experiences which constitute the attitude revealed in the intuition of the Wesensschau, and its content, are as sincere and spontaneous as possible. But that does not make them objectively correct. Indeed this spontaneity, by betraying its immediate uncritical attitude toward the
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basic phenomenon, creates the false consciousness: fetishism. Fetishism signifies, in brief, that the relations among human beings which function by means of objects are reflected in human consciousness immediately as things, because of the structure of capitalist economy. They become objects or things, fetishes in which men crystallize their social relationships, as savages do their relationships to nature; and for savages the laws of natural relations are just as impenetrable as the laws of the capitalist system of economy are to the men of the world of today. Like savages, modern men pray to the fetishes they themselves have made, bow down to them, and sacrifice to them (e.g., the fetish of money). Human relations, as Marx says, acquire "a spectral objectivity." The social existence of man becomes a riddle in his immediate experience, even though objectively he is a social being first and foremost, despite all immediate appearances to the contrary.
It is not our aim nor our task to treat of the problem of fetish making: to do so would require a systematic development of the whole structure of capitalist society and the forms of false consciousness arising out of it. I shall merely point out the most important questions which have had decisive influence on the development of existentialism.
The first is life’s losing its meaning. Man loses the center, weight, and connectedness of his own life, a fact life itself compels him to realize. The phenomenon has been known for a long time. Ibsen, in Peer Gynt, puts it into a striking little scene. The aging Peer Gynt is peeling off the layers of an onion, and playfully compares the single layers with the periods of his life, hoping at the end to come to the core of the onion and the core of his own personality. But layer follows layer, period after period of life; and no core is found.
Every one whom this experience has touched faces the question: How can my life become meaningful? The man who lives in the fetish-making world does not see that every life is rich, full, and meaningful to the extent that it is consciously linked in human relations with other lives. The isolated egoistic man who lives only for himself lives in an impoverished world. His experiences approach threateningly close to the unessential and begin to merge into nothingness the more exclusively they are his alone, and turned solely inward.
The man of the fetishized world, who can cure his disgust with the world only in intoxication, seeks, like the morphine addict, to find a way out by heightening the intensity of the intoxicant rather than by
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a way of life that has no need of intoxication. He is not aware that the loss of communal life, the degradation and dehumanization of collective work as a result of capitalist division of labor, and the severance of human relations from social activity have stupefied him. He does not see this, and goes further and further along the fatal path, which tends to become a subjective need. For in capitalist society public life, work, and the system of human relations are under the spell of fetish making, reification and dehumanization. Only revolt against the actual foundations, as we can see in many authors of the time, leads to a clearer appreciation of these foundations, and thence to a new social perspective. Escape into inwardness is a tragi-comical blind alley.
As long as the pillars of capitalist society seemed unshakable, say up to the First World War, the so-called avant-garde danced with the fetishes of their inner life. Some writers, it is true, saw the approach of the inevitable catastrophe (Ibsen, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, etc.). The gaudy carnival, often with a ghastly tone from tragic incidental music, went on uninterrupted. The philosophy of Simmel and Bergson and much of the literature of the time show exactly where things were heading.
Many a good writer and keen thinker saw through the intoxication of carnival to the fact that the fetishized ego had lost its essence. But they went no further than to sketch tragic or tragi-comic perspectives behind the garish whirl. The fetishized bases of life seemed so beyond question that they escaped study, let alone criticism. If there were doubts, they were like the doubt of the Hindu who questioned the accepted doctrine that the world rests on a huge elephant; he asked modestly on what the elephant rested; and when told it rested on a huge tortoise, he went his way contented. Mind was so formed by fetish thinking that when the First World War and the subsequent series of crises called the very possibility of human existence into question, giving a new tinge to every idea, and when the carnival of isolated individualism gave way to its Ash Wednesday, there was still virtually no change in the way that philosophical questions were asked.
Yet the aim and direction of the quest for essence did change. The existentialism of Heidegger and Jaspers is proof. The experience which underlies this philosophy is easily stated: man stands face to face with nothingness or nonbeing. The fundamental relation of man
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to the world is the situation of vis-à-vis de rien. There is nothing particularly original in this. Ever since Poe, perhaps the first to describe the situation and the corresponding attitude, modern literature has dwelt upon the tragic fate which drives a man to the edge of the abyss. As examples we may mention the situation of Raskolnikov after the murder, and the road to suicide of Svidrigailov or Stavrogin. What is involved here? A characteristic tragic form of development, arising out of present-day life. A great writer weaves these tragic destinies, which are as vivid and positive as were the tragedies of Oedipus and Hamlet in their day.
The originality of Heidegger is that he takes just such situations as typical and makes them his starting point. With the help of the complicated method of phenomenology, he lodges the entire problem in the fetishized structure of the bourgeois mind, in the dreary hopeless nihilism and pessimism of the intellectuals of the interval between the two world wars. The first fetish is the concept of nothingness. In Heidegger as in Sartre, this is the central problem of reality, of ontology. In Heidegger nothingness is an ontological datum on a level with existence; in Sartre it is only one factor in existence, which nevertheless enters into all the manifestations of being.
A very specialized philosophical dissertation would be required to show the chains of thought, sometimes quite false, sometimes obviously sophistical, by which Sartre seeks to justify his theory of negative judgment. It is true that, for every "No" which expresses a particular judgment, there is a positively existing situation. But it is only idolizing of subjective attitudes that gives nothingness the semblance of reality. When I inquire, for instance, what the laws of the solar system are, I have not posited any negative being, such as Sartre envisages. The meaning of my question is simply that I lack knowledge. The answer may be put in either positive or negative form, but the same positive reality is indicated in either case. Only sophistry could infer the "existence" of nonbeing. The nothingness which fascinates recent philosophers is a myth of declining capitalist society. While previously it was individuals (though socially typical ones) like Stavrogin and Svidrigailov that had to face nothingness, today it is a whole system that has reached this chimerical outlook. For Heidegger and Sartre life itself is the state of being cast into nothingness.
Existentialism consistently proclaims that nothing can be known by
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man. It does not challenge science in general; it does not raise skeptical objections to its practical or technical uses. It merely denies that there is a science which has the right to say anything about the one essential question: the relation of the individual to life. This is the alleged superiority of existentialism to the old philosophy. "Existential philosophy," Jaspers says, "would be lost immediately if it started believing again that it knew what man is." This radical ignorance on principle, which is stressed by Heidegger and Sartre, is one of the main reasons for the overwhelming influence of existentialism. Men who have no prospects themselves find consolation in the doctrine that life in general has no prospects to offer.
Here existentialism flows into the modern current of irrationalism. The phenomenological and ontological method seems, it is true, to stand in bold contrast to the ordinary irrationalist tendencies. Are not the former "rigorously scientific," and was not Husserl a supporter of the most fanatical of logicians, Bolzano and Brentano? But even a superficial study of the method at once discloses its links with the masters of irrationalism, Dilthev and Bergson. And when Heidegger renewed Kierkegaard’s efforts, the tie became even closer.
This connection is more than an accidental convergence of two methods. The more phenomenology is transformed into the method of existentialism, the more the underlying irrationality of the individual and of being becomes the central object, and the closer becomes its affinity to irrational currents of the time. Being is meaningless, uncaused, unnecessary. Being is by definition "the originally fortuitous," says Sartre. If nothingness comes to "exist" by the magic of existentialism, existence is made negative. Existence is what man lacks. The human being, says Heidegger, "knows what he is only from ‘existence,’ i.e., from his own potentialities," whether he becomes the one he "is," or not. Is man’s becoming authentic or not? We have seen that in the leading trends of modern philosophy this question has an antisocial character. Using the familiar method, Heidegger subjects man’s everyday life to phenomenological analysis. The life of man is a co-existence and at the same time a being-in-the-world. This being also has its fetish; namely, "one." In German, subjectless sentences begin with man ("one") : "One writes," "One does." Heidegger, making myths, erects this word into an ontological existent in order to express philosophically what seems to him to be the function of society and social
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life; viz., to turn man away from himself, to make him unauthentic, to prevent him from being himself. The manifestation of "one" in daily life is chatter, curiosity, ambiguity, "falling." To follow the path of one’s own existence, according to Heidegger, one must take the road to death, his own death; one must live in such a way that his death does not come upon him as a brute fact breaking in on him from without, but as his own. Actual existence can find its crowning achievement only in such a personal demise. The complete capriciousness and subjectivism of the ontology, concealed behind a show of objectivity, come to light once more. As a confession of a citizen of the 1920’s, Heidegger’s way of thinking is not without interest. Sein und Zeit is at least as absorbing reading as Céline’s novel, Voyage au bout de Ia nuit. But the former, like the latter, is merely a document of the day showing how a class felt and thought, and not an "ontological" disclosure of ultimate truth. It is only because this book is so well suited to the emotional world of today’s intellectuals that the arbitrariness of its pseudoargumentation is not exposed. The contrast of abstract death to meaningless life is for many men today an implicit axiom. But it suffices to glance at the mode of thought of older times, before collapse started, to realize that this attitude toward death is not the ontological character of "being" but a transitory phenomenon. Spinoza said: "The free man thinks of anything but his death; his wisdom is not death but pondering on life."
Jaspers and Sartre are less radical than Heidegger in this respect, although their thought is not the less conditioned by time and class. Sartre flatly rejects the concept of specific or personal death as a category of existentialism. In Jaspers, the phantom of "one" does not appear formally in such a radically mystifying form, but only as the totality of the nameless powers ruling life (that is, essentially, social life once more objectivized in a fetish). He contents himself with assigning man, once he has acquired his essence and begun to live his own private existence, strictly to the paths of private life. In Geneva recently Jaspers developed the thesis that nothing good or essential can come of political or social activity: the salvation of man is possible only when every one passionately concerns himself exclusively with his own existence and in relations with other individuals of like persuasion.
Here the labors of the philosophical mountain have only produced
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a dreary Philistine mouse. Ernst Bloch, the well known German anti-fascist writer (whose book appeared in 1935), said of Heidegger’s death theory (from which Jaspers’ personal morality is obtained simply by the addition of water) : Taking eternal death as goal makes man’s existing social situation a matter of such indifference that it might as well remain capitalistic. The assertion of death as absolute fate and sole destination has the same significance for today’s counterrevolution as formerly the consolation of the hereafter had. This keen observation casts light too on the reason why the popularity of existentialism is growing not only among snobs but also among reactionary writers.
3. Freedom in a Fetishized World and the Fetish of Freedom
Je construis l’universel en me choisissant.
—SARTRE: L’Existentialisme est un hurnanisme.
Existentialism is the philosophy not only of death but also of abstract freedom. This is the most important reason for the popularity of Sartre’s forms of existentialism; and—although it may sound paradoxical—the reactionary side of existentialism’s present influence is here concealed. Heidegger, as we know, saw the way to existence’s becoming essential and real only in a life directed toward death; Sartre’s shrewd comments put an end to the specious probativeness of Heidegger’s exposition. This contradiction between Sartre and Heidegger is an expression not merely of the divergent attitudes of French and German intellectuals toward the central problems of life, but also of the changed times. Heidegger’s basic book appeared in 1927, on the eve of the new world crisis, in the oppressed murky atmosphere before the fascist storm; and the effect Bloch described was the general state of intellectuals. We do not know when Sartre’s book appeared; the nominal date is 1943—that is, when liberation from fascism was already in sight and when, just because of the decade-long rule of fascism, the longing for freedom was the deepest feeling of the intellectuals of all Europe, especially of countries where they had grown up in democratic traditions. The inner experience—above all, in the
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western countries—was one of freedom in general, abstractly, without analysis or differentiation, in brief freedom as myth, which precisely because of its formlessness was able to unite under its flag all enemies of fascism, who (whatever their point of view) hated their origin or their goal. Only one thing mattered to these men, to say "No" to fascism. The less specific the "No" was, the better it expressed the feeling of actuality. The abstract "No" and its pendant, abstract freedom, were to many men the exact expression of the "myth" of the resistance. We shall see that Sartre’s notion of freedom is most abstract. This enables us to understand why the sense of the time exalted existentialism and yielded to it as adequate philosophy of the day.
However, fascism collapsed, and the construction and reenforcement of democracy and free life engaged the public opinion of every country as its first concern. Every serious argument, from politics to Weltanschauung, revolves now around the question of what the democracy and freedom should be which mankind is building on the ruins of fascist destruction.
Existentialism has kept its popularity under these changed circumstances; indeed, it would seem that it is now for the first time—to be sure, in Sartre’s formulation, not Heidegger’s—on the road to world conquest. One decisive factor here is the fact that existentialism gives the notion of freedom a central place in its philosophy. But today freedom is no longer a myth. The strivings for freedom have become concrete, more and more concrete every day. Violent disputes over the interpretation of freedom and democracy have split the supporters of the various schools into antagonistic camps. Under such circumstances how is it possible that existentialism, with its rigid, abstract conception of freedom, should become a world-wide trend? Or more precisely, whom, and how, does existentialism carry conviction as a philosophy of freedom? To answer this central question, we must come to closer grips with Sartre’s concept of freedom.
According to him, freedom is a basic fact of human existence. We represent, says Sartre, "freedom which chooses, but we could not choose to be free. We are doomed to freedom." We are thrown into freedom (Heidegger’s Geworfenheit).
Not choosing, however, is just as much choice as choosing is; avoiding action is action too. Everywhere Sartre stresses this role of freedom, from the most primitive facts of everyday life to the ultimate
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questions of metaphysics. When I take part in a group excursion, get tired, am weighed down by my pack, and so forth, I am faced with the fact of free choice, and must decide whether I will go on with my companions or throw off my burden and sit down by the roadside. From this problem the way leads to the final, most abstract problems of human existence; in the plans or projects in which man concretizes his free decision and free choice (projet, projeter is one of the most important notions of Sartre’s theory of freedom) there lies the content of the ultimate ideal, the last "project": God. In Sartre’s words: "The basic plan of human reality is best illustrated by the fact that man is the being whose plan it is to become God. . . . Being a man is equivalent to being engaged in becoming God." And the philosophical content of this ideal of God is the attainment of that stage of existence which the old philosophy denoted as causa sui.
Sartre’s notion of freedom is extremely broad and indeterminate, lacking specific criteria. Choice, the essence of freedom, consists for him in the act of choosing oneself. The constant danger lurking here is that we could become other than we are. And here there is no moral compass or plumb line. For instance, cowardice stems from free choice just as much as courage does. "My fear is free and attests my freedom; I have cast all my freedom into my fear and chosen myself as cowardly in such and such circumstances; in other circumstances I might exist as courageous and put my freedom into courage. With respect to freedom, no ideal has any precedence."
Since for Sartre all human existence is free by definition, his notion of freedom is even more indefinite than that of Heidegger. Heidegger could differentiate between the free and the unfree. For him, that man is free who programmatically lives toward his own death; unfree and unauthentic, he who, forgetting his own death, lives not as a self but in the crowd. Sartre rejects this criterion, as we have seen. He also rejects such a hierarchy of moral values as Scheler had conceived, as well as any connection of free choice with man’s past, viz., the principle of continuity and consistency of personality. Finally, he denies the Kantian formal distinction between free and unfree acts.
He seems, it is true, to be somewhat frightened by this indeterminateness. In his popular pamphlet he says, "Nothing can be good for us which is not good for everyone," and in another place: "At the
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same time that I will my own freedom it is my duty to will the freedom of others. I cannot set my own freedom as goal unless I also set that of others as my goal." This sounds very fine. But in Sartre it is only an eclectic insertion into existentialism, of the moral principles of the Enlightenment and the Kantian philosophy. Kant did not succeed in establishing objective morality by generalizing subjectivity. The young Hegel, in a sharp critique, showed this failure. However, Kant’s generalization still stands in intimate connection with the first principles of his social philosophy; in Sartre, this generalization is an eclectic compromise with traditional philosophical opinion, contradicting his ontological position.
In his capital work he does not make these concessions. True to his basic thought, ontological solipism, the content and goal of the free act are meaningful and explicable only from the point of view of the subject. Here Sartre still states a view opposite to that of his popular brochure: "Respect for the freedom of one’s fellow man is idle chatter: even if we could so plan that we honored this freedom, such an attitude would be a violation of the freedom which we were so busy respecting." In the same place he illustrates this conception by a very concrete example: "When I bring about tolerance among my fellow men I have forcibly hurled them into a tolerant world. In so doing I have in principle taken away their free capacity for courageous resistance, for perseverance, for self-testing, which they would have had the opportunity of developing in some world of intolerance."
This cynical view that there are no unfree acts has significant resemblance to the view that there are no free acts. While even Heidegger knew that we can speak of a free act only if man is capable of being coerced as well, Sartre does not know this. Like the determinist, Sartre reduces human phenomena to one level. But determinism is at least a system, verifiable in part, whereas Sartre’s free acts are a disconnected, fortuitous conglomeration.
What is the legitimate factor in Sartre? Without question, the emphasis on the individual’s decision, whose importance was undervalued alike by bourgeois determinism and by vulgar Marxism. All social activity is made up of the actions of individuals, and no matter how decisive the economic basis may be in these decisions, its effects are felt only "in the long run," as Engels so often stresses. This means that there is always a concrete area of free choice for the individual,
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which does not conflict with the feet that history has its general and necessary trends of development. The mere existence of political parties proves the reality of this area. The main directions of development can be foreseen; but, as Engels stressed, it would be idle pedantry to try to foretell from the laws of evolution whether in a given case Peter or Paul will individually decide this way or that, vote for this party or the other, and so forth. The necessity of evolution is always effected by means of internal and external contingencies. It would be a service to science to show their significance and study their place and role, if at the same time their methodological meaning in the whole dialectical process were more precisely determined than formerly. In this sense a role which should not be underestimated attaches to moral problems and questions of freedom and individual decision in the total dialectical knowledge of social development.
Sartre, to be sure, does exactly the opposite. We have seen that, as has been fashionable for decades, he denies necessary development and even development itself. Even in the case of individuals he divorces decision situations from the past. He denies any genuine connection of the individual with society. He construes the individual’s world as completely different from that of his fellow men. The notion of freedom thus obtained is fatalistic and strained in a mechanical way; it thus loses all meaning. If we look at it a little more closely, it has virtually no connection with the actual moral concept of freedom. It says no more than what Engels said in an occasional remark; namely, that there is no human activity in which individual consciousness could not play a part.
Obviously Sartre himself sees the difficulty of his notion of freedom. But he remains faithful to his method, and busies himself with balancing one overstrained and meaningless conception against another: freedom against responsibility, the latter being for Sartre just as universal and unconditionally valid as the concept of freedom. "If I choose to join the army instead of to die or suffer dishonor, that is equivalent to taking the entire responsibility for this war."
Here again the formal-logical overstraining of a relative truth-factor leads to the theoretical and practical annihilation of the concept in question. For so rigid a formulation of responsibility is identical with complete irresponsibility. We did not need to be politicians or Marxists to see that. A master of the "psychology of depths," Dos-
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toevski, often said that extreme rigid forcing of moral principles and moral decisions generally has no influence on men’s actions. They sweep overhead, and the men who act on them have weaker moral guidance than would be the case if they had no principles at all. In the shadow of the rigorous pitiless feeling of responsibility, extending to the point of suicide, it is easy to commit one villainy after another with frivolous cynicism.
Sartre sees something of all this, but without drawing any conclusions from it. So he weaves fetishes and myths around the problem he vaguely discerns, and concludes with the trivial phrase: "Any one who in anguish" (angoisse has been a decisive category of existentialism since the Kierkegaardian Reception) "realizes that his condition of life is that of being thrown into a responsibility which leads to complete isolation: that man knows no more remorse, regret, or self-justification." Just as the sublime is but a step from the ridiculous, so a certain kind of moral sublimity is only a step from frivolity and cynicism.
It was necessary for us to elaborate thus sharply on the bankruptcy of the Sartrean concept of freedom because this is precisely the key to the widespread effectiveness of the doctrine in certain circles. Such an abstract, forced, totally vacuous and irrationalized conception of freedom and responsibility, the haughty scorn for social viewpoints and public life used to defend the ontological integrity of the individual—all adequately rounds out the myth of nothingness, especially for the requirements of snobs: for they must be particularly impressed with the mixture of cruelly strict principle with cynical looseness of action and moral nihilism. But in addition this conception of freedom gives a certain section of intellectuals, always inclined toward extreme individualism, an ideological support and justification for refusing the unfolding and building of democracy. There have been writers who, calling themselves democrats, under took to defend the rights of the black market and of the sabotaging and swindling capitalist, all in the name of individual freedom, and who carried the principle so far that room is found for the freedom of reaction and fascism; responsibility has been the slogan in whose name the attempt was first made to block the registration of the new owners’ land and later to call for their return. Sartre’s abstract and strained conception of freedom and responsibility was just what these forces could use.
Sartre’s hooks do not give us the impression that he exactly desires
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to be the ideologist of these groups; and certainly there are genuine and sincere democrats among his French supporters. But large-scale fashions pay little heed to the internal intentions of their authors. The various currents of society have their own ideological requirements, and say with Moliere, "je prends mon bien où je le trouve." So, not only snobbishness but reaction too manages to cook its broth at the fire of existentialism. This is one more reason for us to point out that the acquisition of existentialism is no Promethean deed, no theft of celestial fire, but rather the commonplace action of using the lighted cigarette of a chance passer-by to light one’s own.
This is no accident, but follows from the very nature of the phenomenological method and from the ontology which grows out of it. The method is far from being as original as its apostles would like to believe. For, no matter how arbitrary the transition may be from "bracketed" reality to allegedly genuine objective reality, the mere possibility of the transition still has its philosophical roots, though this point never is consciously formulated by the ontologists. This basis is essentially that of the dominant theory of knowledge in the nineteenth century; namely, the Kantian. Kant’s clear formulation had the cogency worthy of a serious philosopher: existence does not signify enrichment of the content of objectivity, and hence not formal enrichment either; the content of the thought-of dollar is exactly the same as that of the real dollar. The existence of the object means neither novelty nor enrichment, whether with respect to content or to structure of the concept. Clearly, therefore, when the ontologists "bracket" the thought-of object and then clear the "brackets," they tacitly assume this Kantian conception.
The notion appears quite obvious; the only thing wrong with it is that it is not true. The Kantian idealism unconsciously borrowed from mechanical materialism the identity of the structure and content of the thought-of and the actual object. The real dialectic of objective reality, however, shows at every step that existence enriches the thought-of object with elements which are conceptually new with respect to content and structure. This consequence follows not only from the virtual infinity of every actual object, as a result of which the most complete thought is only an approximation, i.e. the object of ontology is even in principle richer in content and therefore of richer, more complicated structure than the phenomenological object of mere
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consciousness. And this is a consequence as well of the extensionally and intensionally infinite Verflochtenheit (interrelatedness) of real objects, in which the reciprocal action of their relations changes the objects’ functions and then reacts on their objectivity. In this context mere existence, the brute fact, becomes under certain circumstances one of the characters and changes the concept of objectivity, with respect to content and structure. Let us consider the theory of money, to continue with Kant’s example. So long as we speak of money as a medium of circulation, we might still assume that thought-of money is identical with real money (although we should be wrong even here). But the very concept of money as a medium of payment implies existence; there is present in this case a conceptual difference between the thought-of dollar and the real one, a difference which constitutes a new category. Only the actual dollar, in one’s possession, can be a means of payment. Money in itself is not enough; we must have it too.
Modern ontology by-passes these considerations, not unintentionally. The isolating intuition of the isolated individual—in this connection it is immaterial whether his interest is directed toward the object, fixed in its rigidity, or toward the changefulness of thought—lifts every object out of the complex and living fabric of its existence, functions, relations, interactions, etc., dissolving it out of the real, living, moving totality. The "original achievement" of phenomenology and ontology in this field consists merely in the fact that it dogmatically identifies reality with the objectivity it has thus obtained. For them, objectivity and objective reality mean one and the same thing.
References
1 Wissenschaft als Philosophie (Zurich, 1945).
SOURCE: Lukács, Georg; translated from the German by Henry F. Mins. "Existentialism", in: Philosophy for the Future: The Quest of Modern Materialism, edited by Roy Wood Sellars, V.J. McGill, Marvin Farber (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1949), pp. 571-590.
Originally published as "Zwei europaische Philosophien (Marxismus und Existentialismus)", in Die Umschau II, January 1947.
This essay was later reprinted in George Novack's Existentialism vs. Marxism, and Marxism and Human Liberation, an anthology of Lukács' writings edited by E. San Juan.
Lukács' book Existentialisme ou Marxisme? (1948; Exisentialismus oder Marxismus?, 1951) has not been translated into English.
Philosophy for the Future: The Quest of Modern Materialism: Foreword & Contents
Simple and Higher Categories of the Dialectic by Georg Lukács
Lukács’ Lost Manuscript Tailism and the Dialectic Reviewed by R. Dumain
The Question of Educational Work by Georg Lukács
Georg Lukács on Irrationalism and Nazism: The Unity of Cynicism and Credulity
"Lukács' and Husserl's Critiques of Science" by Mihály Vajda
Positivism vs Life Philosophy (Lebensphilosophie) Study Guide
Salvaging Soviet Philosophy (1)
Nietzsche as Founder of Irrationalism in the Imperialist Period
(Chapter III of The Destruction of Reason) by Georg Lukács
(offsite)
"Existentialism" by Georg Lukacs (this essay offsite)
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The crisis today and capitalism’s eventual supersession
Debating transition and neoliberalism
Nick Rogers outlines two key differences with the perspectives of the CPGB’s Draft programme
Open debate is the life-blood of the workers’ movement. It provides the opportunity to test theories, and the strategies and tactics that arise from them, against a changing world. It is the strongest defence against organisational stagnation. For a communist party no debate is more important than that around the programme, for it is in this document that the party sets out its strategic perspectives.
The CPGB published a redrafted Draft programme back in February.[1] Since then a number of criticisms of the redraft have appeared both in the form of letters and full-length articles. Last month Jack Conrad - in the first contribution from a member of the Provisional Central Committee - published three articles in the Weekly Worker replying to criticisms of the new draft.[2] Specifically, Jack took on articles by Paul Cockshott and me.
In this single article I will respond to some of the criticisms Jack makes of my contributions, offering further clarification of my position. In doing so, I aim to highlight what seem to me to be two key areas of theoretical difference between us and touch on the programmatic implications of these differences. The two areas are the interaction between ‘decline’ and neoliberalism, and the transition to communism.
Decline
In one article[3] Jack Conrad accuses me of a “surprising failure to grasp” the concept of decline, along with those of “surplus working population and subsistence”. In another[4] he suggests that I dismiss “the idea that British capitalism shows signs of relative weakness and that the entire capitalist system is in secular decline. Sadly not essential laws and tendencies, but strike days, trade union membership, privatisations and other statistics are cited as evidence. Like comrade Cockshott, he too maintains that our Draft programme is ‘wrong’ when it states that unemployment is an inevitable by-product of capitalism.”
I do not think that these charges are borne out by a considered reading of what I actually wrote.
To deal with the most important accusation first, it is hardly the case that I deny the reality of “secular decline”. I did not write about decline at length in my articles on the Draft programme, so perhaps I should sketch out my perspective. I see capitalism from the latter part of the 19th century as responding to two long-term trends.
The first is the tendency towards the concentration of ownership - ie, monopoly (or, perhaps more accurately, oligopoly) - going along with a rising organic composition of capital (ie, more investment in machines and fixed capital). The larger quantity of capital required of capitalists to enter the world of profit-making makes long-term planning of prospective markets and the greater assurance of the returns to be expected increasingly imperative if investment is to happen at all. Hence capitalists strive for monopolistic (or oligopolistic) control of production and form cartels to stabilise their markets. All in the interests of maximising their own profits, of course.
The second is the rising challenge of the working class. This becomes a particularly acute problem for the capitalist class when it takes a political form. The earlier fears of the ruling class that universal suffrage (or something close to it) would lead to revolutionary consequences - the expropriation of the propertied by those without property - have yet to be fulfilled. The ruling class nevertheless has paid a price. The extension of the vote to the working class recast the terms of political debate. During election campaigns politicians now have to make an explicit appeal to the interests of the majority and in government they have to take account of those interests.
Working class industrial organisation not only forced concessions from capitalists in the workplace, but reinforced developments in the political sphere. Marx identified the early factory acts as victories for the “political economy of the working class”.
Both these tendencies require that the capitalist state play an increasing role in the economy and society - both to plan and regulate economic activity, and to manage the relationship between the capitalist and working classes. The increasing role of the state in society and economy cannot but transform relations between states. The relative success of national capitalist classes depends on the comparative strength of their respective states. Hence the rise of imperialism and the international division of labour.
Jack believes that I am not interested in “essential laws and tendencies”. In fact, contrary to Jack’s assertion, in the article in question I cite not one specific statistic. It is only tendencies that I discuss. I do make reference to real events and developments. That means I could have produced statistics to back up my analysis if I had been so inclined and in a longer contribution I would do so. Surely, Jack does not object to rooting our analysis, whether of political economy or political strategy, in the world as it actually is?
So what might be the difference on the question of ‘decline’ between Jack and me? I think we have a different take on the immediate consequences of decline.
While the tendencies I have outlined point towards capitalism’s eventual supersession - socialisation of the economy and the political and social victory of the working class - they provide little guidance on the immediate prospects for capitalism. I do not think they imply that capitalism is about to collapse of its own volition, whatever phase of the economic cycle we happen to be in. I do not underestimate the seriousness of the current economic crisis, but without a decisive political intervention by the working class (and that can only be by a communist party with mass support) capitalism will survive and in time economically revive. I do not believe any purely economic crisis will be terminal for capitalism.
This was not the position of communists in the 1920s and 30s. From Lenin onwards the ‘imperialist’ stage of capitalist development was seen as synonymous with actual stagnation or decline of productive forces. This was not an unreasonable conclusion to draw from the economic crises of that era. But in the light of post-World War II developments I think we have to accept that capitalism has the capacity to restore growth and generate striking technological innovation.
This is not incompatible with an analysis that recognises the continuing strengthening of the tendencies associated with ‘decline’. It is an interpretation that recognises ‘decline’ as a very long-term secular process and not a process that is likely to lead to an immediate collapse of capitalism.
Indeed, it is only the continuing ability of capitalism to expand productive forces and increase the size of the global working class that validates our project as the materialist one of building communism on the basis of developments within the capitalist mode of production. If capitalism were to exhaust its capacity to both internationalise and socialise production - no doubt the ultimate destiny of the present social system - in the absence of a working class in pretty short order able to take power on a global scale, the possibility of a communist future would slip from our grasp.
It seems to me that the theory of a permanent arms economy, a variety of which the Draft programme endorses (section 1.3), is an attempt to discount economic developments over the last 65 years. How to defend Trotsky’s prediction that the end of World War II would see a renewed economic slump against the reality of a long economic boom? Why, argue that the cold war and high levels of military expenditure mean that, in effect, the world war has yet to come to an end - or at least did not end until 40 or 50 years after 1945.
As I argued in my original article,[5] this analysis incorrectly interprets the role of what in the United States is an unquestionably large military-industrial sector - although nothing on the scale of military production and mobilisation during World War II. I think the relevant paragraph ought to be deleted from the Draft programme.
Neoliberalism
The sharpest difference between Jack and me is over the question of neoliberalism. I wrote that neoliberalism “has allowed the capitalist class to offset (or roll back) many of the features associated with ‘decline’. Concessions to the organised working class (politically, socially and industrially) have been radically weakened. State micro-management of particular economic sectors has been substantially reduced. The emphasis of macro-management has changed, with genuine moves to focus on ‘inflation targeting’ via independent (ie, partly privatised) central banks rather than on growth and jobs.”[6]
It would be a strange Marxist analysis that failed to recognise the internal contradictions and dynamic flux within any process or tendency. No graph of a real-life phenomenon follows one inexorable straight line. Yet it is precisely my contention that neoliberalism represents a partially successful attempt by the capitalist class to push back against the secular tendencies of ‘decline’ which causes Jack most offence.
Neoliberalism has not made ‘decline’ irrelevant. As I went on to say, “The reversal of ‘decline’ is partial and contradictory: privatisation has often required the state to set up tight regulation of the privatised monopolies; the most dynamic parts of the world economy, in China and east Asia, have the greatest degree of state control (and ownership); in the US, Reagan and Bush junior have run deficit economic regimes; government social expenditure as a proportion of GNP generally had not declined.”
The credit crunch and financial crash do not change this reality. The response of capitalist governments confirms the vital role of the state in managing economic affairs. It also signals that those governments currently calculate that they have very little to fear from a resurgent working class. A reversion to Keynes’s measures to combat looming economic catastrophe is possible only because there is no need to make concomitant concessions to the working class. On the contrary, off the back of a massive financial package to save finance capital, a fresh onslaught against the working class gains and conditions is being prepared.
Jack, quoting Hillel Ticktin, may assert that “Neoliberalism as an ideology now looks ‘dated at best and a failure at worst’”, but neoliberalism was never primarily a free-market ideology. Nor does the term ‘financialisation’ accurately encapsulate it - the promotion of a strengthened role for financial institutions was a strategy of US imperialism to forestall its relative decline. ‘Neoliberalism’ was and is at its heart a global attack by the capitalist class on the working class. That attack shows no sign of abating and demonstrates the continuing political self-confidence of the capitalist class.
That is why I object to the Draft programme’s comment that “the erosion of the social democratic settlement, beginning in the late 1970s, testified to the diminishing strength of British imperialism” (section 2.1). Not because I question the relative weakening of British imperialism, but because the relative position of British imperialism has little explanatory power when it comes to a global phenomenon such as the capitalist neoliberal offensive.
And what of Jack’s accusation in an extended passage on unemployment? He writes “comrades Cockshott and Rogers quote the experience of the 1940s-60s economic boom and the policy of full employment .... Clearly comrades Cockshott and Rogers believe that unemployment is due to the policies and coloration of ‘this or that government’ .... Perhaps comrade Rogers thinks that the balance of class forces can be titled back and once again full employment imposed on the capitalist class.”[7]
Only a glancing familiarity with the article he is critiquing can explain Jack’s blatant misrepresentation of my position. Perhaps Jack was distracted by the dual-headed Cockshott-Rogers ogre he summons into life.
It is true that I take issue with the phrase, “unemployment is an inevitable by-product of capitalism” (section 3.6). But my argument that “Unemployment … is central to the ability of capitalists to control workers and hold down wages and conditions” might have caused Jack to consider that it was not the inevitability of unemployment that I disagree with, but the Draft programme’s designation of it as a by-product - as if everyone would prefer there was not any unemployment, but unfortunately there is nothing we can do about it.
Unemployment is to wage-slavery what the whip is to chattel slavery - inevitable and absolutely necessary for the health of the social system. As I also argue, “the principal component of the offensive globally was the decision to abandon the post-war commitment to full employment. In fact economic policy was readjusted to mandate a ‘non-inflationary’ level of unemployment - the ‘reserve army of labour’ was to be recreated.”
What should the Draft programme say about neoliberalism? I have no “underlying agenda”, as Jack alleges[8], in the sense of a cunning plan to insert my thinking into the Draft programme by subterfuge. Submitting an article to the Weekly Worker strikes me as a fairly open and explicit course of action. In the interests of being entirely upfront, let me say again that I do think that the Draft programme should discuss neoliberalism as an international - not just a British - phenomenon.
I recognise that the terms of the class struggle are always fluid. Nevertheless, a programme due to be agreed in 2011 should address a tide in the class struggle that has prevailed for at least the last quarter of a century. Our programme is only relevant so long as it takes account of the social and political terrain that defines our strategy and tactics.
When that terrain shifts, our programme should be amended. We are not drafting a timeless text so abstract and so pure that it will hold good, whatever vicissitudes confront us in the decades to come. A communist programme needs to be a living document, subject to regular amendment as the class struggle shifts and, for that matter, as different ideas are fought out within the party itself.
Transition to communism
Jack Conrad apparently has more time for my discussion of the transition to communism.[9] Nevertheless, there are significant differences between us. To summarise, the Draft programme uses the term ‘socialism’ to refer both to the period of political rule by the working class immediately after we come to power and the period after the “full socialisation of production”, when society is evolving towards “full communism”.
Jack and the Draft programme, then, conceive of one period of transition, whereas most classical Marxists (ie, Lenin, the Bolsheviks in general and Trotsky) speak of a conceptually distinct period of workers’ rule and a first phase of communism (to which the term ‘socialism’ is often applied).
Jack cites the Critique of the Gotha programme (1875) in justification of his schema. Yet Marx in that document quite clearly speaks of the “first phase of communist society” as “a cooperative society based on common ownership of the means of production”. It “recognises no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else”. There is no exploitation: “Nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals except individual means of consumption.”
Elsewhere in the Critique of the Gotha programme Marx discusses the transition from capitalism to communism: “Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of revolutionary transformation of one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Now, Jack is correct to point out that the dictatorship of the proletariat refers to the state form rather than the actual transition period, but, for Marx, is the revolutionary transformation of capitalism into communism the same as the “first phase of communist society”? Is the state form of the “first phase of communist society” the dictatorship of the proletariat, as Jack insists?
I think the clue is in the terminology Marx uses. The “first phase of communist society” is still communism. It is not a distinct form of society, but part of the communist mode of production. The transition from capitalism to communism is therefore the transition to the “first phase of communist society”. The “first phase of communist society” can not be part of the transition to communist society.
The only way Jack can logically apply his interpretation to the Critique of the Gotha programme is to argue that, while in one passage Marx uses ‘communism’ to refer to both the first and higher phases of this mode of production, in the other ‘communism’ refers exclusively to the “higher phase of communism” (or “full communism”, as the Draft programme puts it). I do not think such an interpretation stands up. I read Marx here as being quite scientifically precise. When he says that the “first phase of communist society” has moved beyond class society, we should take him at his word.
What is more, in no other text I know does Marx distinguish the two phases of communism that he discusses in the Critique of the Gotha programme. In my article on this aspect of the programme,[10] I quoted at length from a passage in Capital volume 1 in which Marx speaks of “an association of free men working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social force ...”. Marx says that the form of social distribution will depend on “the corresponding level of social development attained by the producers”. No sharp distinction, then, between phases, but rather the concept that communist society itself undergoes a process of evolution.
Perhaps we should take seriously what Marx says in the Critique of the Gotha programme about it being “a mistake to make a fuss about so-called distribution and put the principal stress on it”. It is the “distribution of the conditions of production themselves” that is crucial and therefore defines a mode of production.
I am reluctant therefore to talk about two or more stages of communist society - one of which is ‘socialism’ and the other ‘communism’. The communist mode of production will undergo constant change and flux and the social forms that evolve will reflect that. It is not therefore a question of two stages versus one stage of transition (or three versus two, if you include the ultimate destination), as Jack characterises the debate, but how you define the transition. The question is whether that transition is from capitalism to a new mode of production based on common ownership of the means of production and self-conscious planning of production by the whole of society. Or a transition to something called “full communism”. In other words, a (comparatively) short versus a long transition?
There are two consequences for the Draft programme. First, the discussion in chapter 5 on the transition to communism makes a number of presumptions that I disagree with. Private property in the means of production and the class struggle will not continue once the equivalent of Marx’s “first phase of communist society” is reached (section 5.1). A residue state form, it is true, will persist as long as the tasks of communist society in overcoming the inheritance of capitalism - the division of labour, attitudes towards work and social responsibility, and insufficient productive forces - remain unresolved. This state form will not be the dictatorship of proletariat for the simple reason that there are no classes for the working class to exercise a dictatorship over and the working class itself very rapidly dissolves into a classless society.
In consequence, once we reach communism, there is a rapidly diminishing role for a communist party - defined, after all, as the party of the working class. Society as a whole takes on responsibility for dealing with social contradictions. It is not a question of a communist party issuing “a correct political line” (section 5). In that sense social evolution within communism - towards “full communism” or otherwise - is “a spontaneous development”. It is therefore not the role of the programme of the communist party to map out the precise line of evolution of communist society.
We should keep conceptually distinct the tasks that confront the working class in overcoming class society - making the revolution and socialising production - from the tasks confronting communism (or ‘socialism’ for those intent on using different terminology for the early phases of communist society). It is the former tasks - broadly summarised as “winning the battle for democracy” and more than challenging enough - which are the crucial concern of a communist programme.
Two, it is not true that “the full socialisation of production is dependent on and can only proceed in line with the withering away of the skill monopolies of the middle class and hence the division of labour” (section 4.3). During the transition from class society we may well make major strides in resolving all kinds of social contradictions, including the division of labour. However, to set ending the division of labour as an absolute barrier to overcoming class society - when Marx sets it as a task of communist society - is a utopian demand that could easily turn into its conservative (reactionary even) opposite.
A living programme
I have focused in this contribution on what seem to me to be the most interesting theoretical debates thrown up by the various contributions in the Weekly Worker on the Draft programme - in particular, the differences I have with Jack Conrad’s recent articles.
Differences remain over some aspects of the ‘Immediate demands’ section (chapter 3) of the Draft programme. But these seem to me to mostly revolve around the degree of detail we should go into and stylistic or sub-editing questions. I am convinced that Jack’s intentions over hours and the minimum wage are sufficiently radical (although in raising these question initially I hardly “lambasted” an apparently over-sensitive PCC). Whether that intent is made unambiguously clear is another issue.
I do think Jack displays an esoteric, and possibly incorrect, understanding of the role of the value of labour-power in Marx’s political economy (section 3.4 on “A minimum net wage to reflect the value of unskilled labour-power”). In general the class struggle between workers and capitalists over the division of the social product is not simply to align the price of labour-power with the value of labour-power, but over the rate at which surplus value is extracted by the capitalist class. It is true that the struggles of the working class themselves can redefine the value of labour-power, but at any one time the demands of the working class extend beyond the then-existing value.
I have argued that chapter 4 of the Draft programme should discuss in a little more detail the role of the working class and our international in the course of the workers’ revolution. I have also raised a difference with Jack’s take on the practice of democracy during the period of working class political rule around the very specific issue of how recallability is to be exercised - by the party or by the working class directly[11]. An important question. We should never propose that the communist party substitutes itself for working class self-activity.
Paul Cockshott accuses the Draft programme of having no economic programme[12]. I have not joined Paul in making this accusation. I realise that the PCC is not advocating a transitional economy to the right of the Attlee government.
However, I do think that the Draft programme is far from clear on the question of socialisation. The rather gnomic “Planning and state control of the financial sector and the monopolies is posed by capitalist development itself” (section 4.3) raises as many questions as it answers. Chapter 4, especially read in conjunction with the passage on economic policy in the ‘Immediate demands’ (section 3.7), is open to genuine misinterpretation. Jack’s attack on Paul’s past in the British and Irish Communist Organisation does not alter that fact.
Nor do I share Jack’s rather defensive position that at times in his articles borders on opposition to any clarification of any aspect of the current draft of the Draft programme. Or his resistance to tampering with its length. The Draft programme is already many times longer than the 19th century min-max programmes Marx and Engels were involved in drafting or critiquing.
That is as it should be. A programme is not the communist equivalent of the tablets of stone brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses. Otherwise, why are we in the CPGB engaged in our current redrafting exercise? As I have argued, in future the programme should be amended to reflect changes in the world we seek to transform and our deepening understanding of theory and strategy.
The programme of a mass communist party challenging for power, for instance, will have a much more fully worked-out section on the economic programme of the transition. For the present, the Draft programme should be just as long as it needs to be in order to clearly explain our strategic perspectives.
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Notes
- www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1002562
- J Conrad, ‘Goldilocks and the communist programme’ Weekly Worker September 9; ‘Neoliberal ghosts and the art of brevity’ Weekly Worker September 16; and ‘The phases of communism’ Weekly Worker September 23.
- J Conrad, September 23.
- Ibid.
- N Rogers, ‘The road to working class revolution’ Weekly Worker April 8.
- Ibid.
- J Conrad, September 16.
- Ibid.
- N Rogers, ‘Communist transition’ Weekly Worker August 26.
- Ibid.
- N Rogers, ‘Electoral reform and communist strategy’ Weekly Worker May 27.
- P Cockshott, ‘Less radical than clause four’ Weekly Worker March 18.
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