Notes on Korsch on Non-Dogmatic Marxism.

Karl Korsch is an appealing figure for any number of reasons. For me, not least important is that he was perhaps the German Marxist with the most consistently positive view of Georges Sorel. A reference to Korsch’s “A Non-Dogmatic Approach to Marxism,” in which Korsch reproduces a chunk of Sorel’s writing from 1902, caught my eye earlier today. I wanted to set down a few points about it.

This is a peculiar text. It appeared in Macdonald’s Politics in 1946 (which means that the original is available here). It consists of an introduction, and four older documents. The first and fourth are by Korsch himself, dated 1931. That was the date of a previous attempt on the part of Korsch and others, he tells us, to de-dogmatize Marxism. The central move seems to me to link Marxism explicitly with activist struggle—to insist, indeed, that Marxist thought can take place only within and through struggle. Marxism, Korsch suggests, has therefore never actually been discussed in America. In any case, he states his own goal thus:

“it is here proposed to revindicate the critical, pragmatic, and activistic element...has never been entirely eliminated from the social theory of Marx and which during the few short phases of its predominance has made that theory a most efficient weapon of the proletarian class struggle” (151)

I won’t here offer comment on Korsch’s own thinking (documents one and four), or on the fragment from a young Lenin (document three). Document two, on the other hand, is labeled as a list of six theses on the Materialistic Conception of History, “Submitted to the 1902 Convention of the Societé Francaise de Philosophie.” This text, Korsch writes, was read and under consideration in 1931. For Korsch, what is valuable is Sorel’s attempt to extract principles for the scientific practice of history from historical materialism. Korsch calls Sorel “one of the most scientific and most pragmatically minded interpreters of Marxism in modern times,” which is not a description with which many people would agree. In any case, for Korsch, Sorel was attempting to make historical materialism generative.  

Why did Korsch pick this particular text? Probably those better versed in Korsch will be the ones to answer. But: this is one of relatively few bulleted lists in Sorel’s writing, and so is apparently clear. Also—and I suspect this has something to do with it—the original publication in the Bulletin de la société française de la philosophie would likely have been available in German universities. Because this is not exactly a communication to a convention, but rather an intervention—although apparently one read out loud—in something like a regular seminar. Sorel was presenting to the Société, whose meetings were not open to the public and mostly, although not exclusively, involved professional philosophers. According to the record (which is hardly a transcription, never mind of course a recording), Sorel had made a short introductory presentation, been challenged on several points by Élie Halévy, and then read several pages of a mémoire to the group, after which the discussion continued.

This particular list, in fact, is the concluding section of Sorel’s remarks in which he presents a set of guidelines that one might extract from the living philosophy of historical materialism for the use of philosophers. Indeed the opposition between philosophers and historians is a significant one for Sorel who was, together with many of his most important interlocutors, able to be now one and now the other. In any case, Sorel says that these points are not so original when cut off from the center of historical materialism as a philosophy, which is to be found in bringing together theory and practice.

Given Korsch’s tendencies, I wonder what he made not only of Halévy’s constant pressure during the discussion on Sorel to clarify the meaning of these terms—theory and practice. I wonder, further, what he made of the disagreement, first between Sorel and Halévy, and then between Halévy and Frederic Rauh, over the status of Capital is Marx’s work. Was Marx basically a man of action, who was always writing from a particular angle, always against someone, always polemicing—or, as Halévy wrote, does Marx, “by his methods of documentation, of work, of exposition...demand to be treated as a systematic philosopher much more than as a man of action” (116 Bul 1902)? More, what about Rauh’s rather wonderful capacity to find in Marxism a theory of moral action (not, perhaps, so different from his own), according to which “like science, morality is relative to a certain time, expresses a certain historical moment, the state of mind of a class” (120 Bul 1902)? These are fireworks!

In any case, it seems to me that Korsch managed to pull out among the driest and least convincingly didactic blocks of texts from what was, in fact, a quite vigorously argued dialogue. Perhaps this was a provocation?

Aron and Schmitt

The new issue of MIH contains a number of interesting pieces. I want to offer now only a brief remark on the basis of one of them: Steinmetz-Jenkins’ essay on Raymond Aron and Carl Schmitt, the full title of which is “Why Did Raymond Aron Write that Carl Schmitt Was Not A Nazi? An Alternative Genealogy of French Liberalism.” In brief, Steinmetz-Jenkins wants to show how, over the course of the 1970s and especially in reaction to 1968, Aron became much closer to Schmitt, borrowing many of his key concepts and framings. The essay is actuated by a remarkable pair of opposing quotes. First, Aron in 1941 referring to Schmitt as “one of the official theorists of National Socialism,” and second Aron in his 1983 Mémoires, “Carl Schmitt never belonged to the National Socialist party. A man of high culture, he could not be a Hitlerian and never was.” Steinmetz-Jenkins’ essay is quite rich and worth the time of anyone interested in the revival of ‘liberalism’ in France since the 1970s.

A few points only. First of all, one should probably put a “recent” or “contemporary” into the subtitle before “French Liberalism.” The work in question is very much post 1968, and especially aimed rather damning, in the conclusion, at Pierre Manent. Second, I think the essay demonstrates a moderately interesting issue in this sort of intellectual history. The two statements quoted are not merely expressing opposed views about the worth of Schmitt’s work, or even his merits as a human being. Rather, at issue is at least in part a matter of fact. Was Schmitt a member of the Nazi party? As Steinmetz-Jenkins shows, at one point in his life, Aron believed (knew!) that he had been, and a rather committed one at that. By the end of his life, in contrast, Aron wrote that Schmitt had not been. Now, Steinmetz-Jenkins shows pretty clearly why Aron’s view of Schmitt might have changed, and even entertains—although I think in the end rejects—the idea that Aron came to believe he had been mistaken earlier in this matter of fact. But what I find missing here—what there is not really room for in this sort of closely-argued, I might venture ‘philological’ sort of intellectual history, a kind of scholarship that appeals to me very much—is psychology. What about an increasingly out of touch, even bitter, older person who is choosing to remember things one way rather than another? What about simple error? Aron, surely a precise and rigorous thinker, is not an ideal candidate for this sort of thing, but I am interested in the way that the mode of intellectual history pursued here rules out this kind of argument.

Third, finally, and at least to me most interesting is the opposition Aron presents in the later quote. One cannot be, cannot have been, both a man of great culture and a Nazi. This is a logical contradiction. Now, this is one line in a late-written memoir. It is not a statement in the philosophy of history. I hesitate to call it symptomatic. Nonetheless, here is surely a nice example of French liberal rationalism. Culture is incompatible with a nihilistic, bad materialist, violence worshiping political ideology. Spirit and matter cannot both be at work. So, anyway, in light of my own thinking about earlier rationalist French liberalism, I would read that line.

A full citation for the article: Steinmetz-Jenkins, Daniel. “Why Did Raymond Aron Write that Carl Schmitt Was Not A Nazi? An Alternative Genealogy of French Liberalism.” Modern Intellectual History, 11, 3 (2014), pp. 549-574.

The Western

Although it has not been my practice, I have decided to do a brief write-up of some of the panels I attended at the Western Society for French History this past weekend in San Antonio. I was, for various reasons, able to attend relatively few; and this is not so much a comprehensive report as a set of impressions. 

I will begin, because it is thematically distinct, with a panel from Saturday morning titled “Work, Freedom, and Markets.” David Allen Harvey spoke about Dupont de Nemours and the case he made—apparently extremely rare—for free rather than slave labor from a physiocratic point of view. So the paper, in essence, contextualized a single fragment of a longer text from the 1760s. Denise N. Rodriguez—who, unfortunately, as far as I know, did not get the credit she deserved for putting reference to The Clash in her title—spoke about a particular category of convicts (recidivists), in French Guiana. The heart of her paper was following and understanding the documentary trail of a few such individuals, mostly around the Caribbean but also to Latin America and Europe. Both papers, in their different ways, were great.

As Judith Coffin, the commentator, remarked, the papers demonstrated a great deal of continuity—surprising or not—between the 18^th and the later 19^th centuries. Certainly I was struck by this as well. There was continuity in problems of freedom—land and labor—as well as in attempts by empires to control movement. Maybe most striking, though, was the obsessive desire to found a white settler colony in the Caribbean, which persisted against what would appear to be all evidence against its plausibility. The audience comments confirmed my pre-existing belief that I should read Paul Chaney’s book, as well as Miranda Spieler’s Empire and Underworld.

But what surprised me most was the revival, during the discussion, of the very question that Dupont de Nemours was himself trying to answer: was slavery more profitable than free labor?  This question irks me. What exactly are the stakes of arguing today about the ‘profitability’ of slavery? Why would we, as historians in the 21^st century, frame the question in this way? Clearly, the terms of the question matter a great deal. But it seems self-evident to me that, on the one hand, slavery was enormously profitable for some people and that, whatever other consequences might have flowed from employing only free labor, a different arrangement of political power would have been required. Of course Dupont de Nemours would reach for this argument if he thought he could make it. Of course the Radicals, and many of those in the penumbra of Bentham, who helped to administer the abolition of slavery in the British empire in the early 19^th century, would think in these terms (I have been re-reading Holt’s Problem of Freedom). It’s a political argument, and these people are trying to make a political point. For the same reason I can see that the debate, within the United States, in some different forms, about the adaptability of chattel slavery as a mode of property relations, would be important well into the 20^th century. But...what point are we trying to make, exactly? Is it still about hashing out Eric Williams? This is a line of questions that, perhaps, the audience would doubtless have objected to in useful ways.

Both of my co-presenters spoke on the interwar, and as it happened the other panel I saw on Saturday was also devoted to this topic. All five of these papers were rich. But the unifying theme, for me, was what I think it’s best to call the topos of language. Of course, already in the 1890s the symbolists were routinely accused of developing private languages. As two papers on arguments over painting (by Mattie Fitch and Mimi Luse) suggested, this accusation continued to be made against non-representational art, or art that was difficult in various ways, through the 1930s, both by the conservative Right and by supporters of socialist realism. Luse’s paper on the agonistic criticism of Camille Mauclaire and Louis Hourticq placed particular emphasis on this. For these conservatives, painting was a unified language, a tradition passed down from the classical world to the present. To destroy this old language by inventing new languages was literally to destroy civilization. Her summary (in my paraphrase): ‘rejection of artistic multiplicity was itself a rejection of the pluralism of the Third Republic.’ So language is here tied to representationality, and that to community (either national or, for the Stalinists, popular). There is (or was), emphatically, a politics of form.

Music, papers by Matt Friedman and Richard Sonn pointed out, has long occupied a special place precisely because it is supposed to escape representationality in a way that painting is supposed to be unable to do (that terrible sentence is, itself, supposed to mark my skepticism). Friedman’s paper, on the French formation of American modernism, dealt with a historiographic landscape (American musical modernism) almost totally foreign to me. Still, I took away the argument that what really united-in-diversity this group of American composers was not so much a common training as a common community, or maybe better, social scene. Although no one pushed him on it, it seemed to me that Friedman was offering something like a Randall Collins-style explanation of the explosion of different tendencies that emerged within something like the same group. Competition for attention and distinction both forged a shared identity and encouraged difference. Only so much attention-space to go around in the American press. To put it this way does an injustice to the empirical wealth of the paper, but captures, I hope, something of the argumentation. I was struck also by the materiality and sociality of music in this paper. Americans had not heard experimental European music in the early 20^th century because even in this, our first globalization, neither scores nor the (technically possible?) recordings had arrived on this side of the Atlantic. That situation is difficult to imagine today, and surely not the case with literature or even, more surprisingly, the visual arts. Richard Sonn’s paper, which compressed a great deal of rich material into 20 minutes, was rooted socially in the social world of Jewish immigrants to Paris in the interwar (Marc Chagall, centrally), and conceptually in the visual representation of music. As Dan Sherman suggested, there is a worthwhile distinction to be made between representations of people performing music (Chagall’s green fiddler on the roof), and music itself (as in more futurist and abstract paintings, Klée, for instance, or Kandinsky). Still, though, the point is that the music escapes the language even of the canvas—music is a marker for the transcendent, extra-linguistic, experience for which painting can only hope. Now, one of the themes of Sonn’s paper was the concrete ethnic (for lack of a better word) location and meaning of much of this music—Klezmer, but also, and interestingly, the bal négre of the 1920s. Which brings me to Nick Underwood’s paper. Underwood hooks the reader with the very idea of Parisian theater critics writing about work performed in a language—Yiddish—that they could not understand. The political context—an attempt from the left to combat widespread antisemitism among its constituents—seems determinate. But the concept at work is that true art, effective art, transcends language. Both these papers evidence situations in which we go wrong in looking for a politics of form.

This is not a question with which I have approached even the pre-1914 years. Yet it seems to me that despite the ‘private language’ accusations against symbolists, language itself is not nearly such a significant metaphor or figure with which to understand art in the prewar period. So, granting for a moment the validity of this general impression from a clutch of papers about the interwar, the question is, why? This is large and very likely poorly framed question. We could punt and say that this has something to do with modernism (doesn’t everything?). My initial suggestion would be that this increased attention to language and the linguistic, in the interwar, is a response to the perception that technological imperatives had come to dominate social ones. Language, as a way to mark, construct, and contest, community, had surely been a feature of the 19^th century—in the 20^th it became available as a metaphorical resource for artists in polemic with one another. Relevant here is obviously a whole slurry of German philosophy (Cassirer and Heidegger), and in the French context the national-linguistic connection. In any case, this is a question that I’ll take into reading Tim Brennan’s Borrowed Light. And surely the best thing one can say of a conference—especially of parts of a conference, is that one left it with questions.

Graphic history

Getz and Clarke. Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History. Oxford 2012. 

How to introduce undergraduates to new perspectives on the world? How to present 'minor' and distinctly subaltern lives in all their human texture, in a way that is historically accurate, inviting, and perhaps also suggestive--especially to students today (whatever that means). Using "a graphic history" to do so is a good and interesting idea.  

Abina and the Important Men tries to do this. It tells, in "graphic" form, about Abina Mansah, a young woman who lived in Cape Coast, what became British West Africa, during the later 19th century. She appears in a single archival document, a court case dated 10 November 1876, in which she brought suit against a man who, she said, had held her as a slave. It is possible to tell the story of this person who has *almost* avoided leaving archival traces not only through general contextualization, but also because a number of the "important men" involved in her case--the local man who spoke for her, the British agent who heard the case, and others--have left more substantial archival records. Abina's suit was not successful, but she seems to have remained as a free person in British territory. So, in fact, it becomes an important and interesting question why she--one assumes--would have wanted to bring the suit in the first place. And it is the answer that the text presents to this question that makes me most uncomfortable with the project. 

In addition to the visual narrative, 80 pages broken into six chapters, we get the transcript itself, a chapter of historical context, a reading guide ("Whose story is this?" "Is this a 'true' story?" "Is this an 'authentic' history?"), a section on classroom uses (probably of interest mainly for the teacher), reading questions, a timeline, and a bibliography. And of course there is a website.

A word on my own perspective. I have not been trained as an Africanist. I am a Europeanist who has, rather circuitously, ended up interested in and teaching Atlantic world material. I am interested in this project (and am happy to have gotten a review copy from Oxford) because I am unsatisfied with the material that I currently have for classroom use about unfree labor, and the larger question of post-emancipation societies on the Atlantic littoral. From this perspective, Abina seems to me excellent. It dramatizes in a striking way the ambiguities of the imperial encounter, of abolition and slavery, of law especially in an imperial context. The problem of freedom--or at least a version of it--would appear, I suspect, squarely before any classroom discussing this text. This is all to the good. 

I won't try to discuss in any critical way the contextual material. The methodological reflections are not at all to my taste, but I think this may have more to do with an uncertainty in the target audience. If this course is for undergraduates, especially in an introductory world history course, I don't know why they really need to hear from Michel-Rolph Trouillot (119)--nor, for that matter, Said and Spivak (121). In these pages, and elsewhere, we frequently hear the names important-sounding people who are important professors at important-sounding institutions. This feels to me like an odd translation from more conventional academic writing--it tastes too much like a monograph and not enough like a textbook. Nor do I think it's useful to call the archival operation here performed "deconstruction" (126). Graduate students should certainly be able to use this term with all appropriate latitude, and should be able to talk about reading against and with the grain of the archive. But although this book seems to me like something graduate students ought to think about, it is certainly not where they ought to be learning about Trouillot, Said, Spivak, deconstruction, and all of this apparatus. All of these names and terms are in there because the authors want to present to students not only this story about Abina Mansah, but also the basic tools and perspectives of the field of World History. I will claim no familiarity with the norms of this field.  

But I wonder if these norms are what explain my main difficulty with the narrative of this book, which is that it presents its own act of historical reconstruction as one of redemption. This returns us to the subject matter. I hope I am not unfairly reconstructing the argument, but I think it goes like this: Abina was not in danger of being re-enslaved, she therefore did not bring suit (and enter the imperial archive) in order to defend herself. Rather, as the character (for that is what we have here) of Abina says at the end: 

"You don't understand. It was never just about being safe, it was about being heard. I went to court so that I could say what needed to be said. So that they would hear how my life was. But now I know that nobody heard me. Now I know that I might as well have kept silent..." (74).

The act of historical reconstruction--in all its contingency--is then represented as more than mere recovery. The authors clearly want to bring forward, to defend in their narrative, the full moral charge of historical work on peoples supposedly without history. The society in which Abina lived has "silenced" her, but as a result of archival discovery and historiographical creation, she is "redeemed." So the chapter title, anyway, tells us. I cannot really accept the historian-as-redeemer, nor do I wish to stand in front of a classroom and claim that is what we historians do. 

So I am left with a few questions. I am attracted to this form of story telling. While I am not competent to judge the historical verisimilitude of the drawings, I can say that they and the narrative worked on me. That's not nothing. But I imagine assigning this book to undergraduates. Would they read more than the graphic narrative? How long would we spend on this book? Then I imagine assigning it, say, to MA students. Is this really a better density than, say, something like Mark Smith's volume Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt? That book gives students actual historiography, developing over a generation, as well as plenty of source material. I can't help but think that for the undergraduates, good historical fiction would do everything that was really required. Although perhaps this is because I feel no allegiance to world history as a field. And graduate students, at whatever level, I think would be better served by Smith's Stono or in different ways--as would undergraduates in many contexts.

 

I hope it is clear that my judgement of this project is by no means negative. The central problems I see are those familiar from most textbooks--who really will use this? How to make something that will be useful for multiple audiences? And of course, as I saw after I'd requested the book from Oxford, but before receiving it, Abina won the James Harvey Robinson prize from the AHA. So my reservations are clearly not shared too widely.