Memoirs of a Revolutionary

Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary (NYRB 2012) left me with the strong urge to write. Indeed among its strongest implicit lessons is that writing is a moral and political task. In the final, hurried chapter Serge defines “intellectual work” as “understanding and expression” (437)—the clarity and force of this makes me think it must be a well-worn line drawn from some classic author unknown to me. It’s an excellent, if capacious, definition. Here, in any case, are some extremely disorganized reactions to this extraordinary book.

           

Serge tells his own story from when he was a boy in Belgium in the pre-war years, up to his arrival in Mexico from Vichy. His memory is almost incredibly prodigious. How can he recount all these things, all these names, with such confidence? Doubtless he make some mistakes, but perhaps we can say this is what you get when you combine a novelist’s eye for detail and character with the time to think that prison can give a person, and with the necessity, born of political chaos and danger, of carrying everything in your head. And in any case, especially once the narrative arrives in Russia, there is a clear work of memory or witness going on. Serge has known many extraordinary people, almost all of them on one loosing side or another. The Old Bolsheviks he knew, in particular, were actively erased from history. Not even history will be safe if we loose (or, rather, if they win). Indeed. 

           

I picked this book up almost by chance. The milieu of Serge’s early life, French-language radical and anarchist, is one I know a little. And it is a compelling read. Serge’s family background—Russian and very political—profoundly shaped his engagement with French and Belgian milieu, of course, but the language of pure revolt, the instinct, the vital necessity of revolt, this is all familiar. And it seems to me that Serge never gives up certain aspects of this early world. For instance an almost biological approach to revolutionary possibility matched with a capacious and idealistic humanism. And he seems to have been an unusually acute participant-observer of the revolutionary years in Russia. I hedge here only because I feel myself radically unequipped to pass judgment on his judgments.

           

The central question, for Serge at least, in writing about 1917-20 is, what went wrong? His answer, at bottom, is simple: the Cheka. Serge recognized the political realities of the civil war, the necessity for rapid, summary justice in certain cases. In places he suggests that the Cheka had from very early on de facto independence, was essentially uncheckable by the political authorities, even when they sought to do so. Thus when the central committee decides to end capital punishment for political crimes, the Checka ‘liquidates their stock’ just before the new policy comes into effect, and this without repercussion. This interacts with other explanations, of course. Serge suggests for instance that if the Red Army had taken Warsaw in 1920 (126ff), then the domestic situation might have been quite different. But other conjunctural and psychological explanations for the Bolshevik choice for Terror are also offered. My own preference is usually for institutional or meso-level explanations for this sort of thing.

In any case, life and death, critical intelligence and fatal necessity, are at war everywhere in the Memoire (and these are basically 19^th century categories). For instance there is the (to me) surprising question of suicide, which returns at many points in the narrative. Does a Bolshevik have the right to take her or his own life? Does this not belong to the party? Is it not for the Party to decide when your usefulness has ceased? And then during the discussion the Moscow trials, we get the chilling line: “In any case, it was not a matter of persuasion: it was, fundamentally, a matter of murder” (394). But can this be entirely right? What about the spectacle of it all? Without claiming to understand better than Serge, it is nonetheless possible to say that, writing in 1940, the Terror of the late 1930s did not make sense to him (although perhaps it is only to me that it does not make sense?). It could not be explained in the way that some earlier episodes of terror could be. Even much of the systemic violence of these years, the destructive, criminal, inefficiencies of agricultural collectivization, this can be rationally understood on the basis of the relative powers and incentives of the various actors. How Stalin’s bureaucracy could fool itself at the expense of the peasant makes sense. But the Terror? Perhaps not. Interestingly, one line of analysis that he does not seem to pursue is the pathological-Stalin line. Neither the Terror nor anything else is laid entirely at Stalin’s door.

The critical intelligence, the free individual, has political prediction as one great and dangerous task. Many of Serge’s predictions seemed uncannily accurate. Almost untrustworthily so. Indeed some lines are very remarkable for being written in the early 1940s. For instance, “the most atrocious and tragic crime of our age: the extermination by the Nazis of the Jews of occupied Europe. Nothing at the present can measure the political, social, and psychological consequences of this crime. Even the idea of the human, acquired over thousands of years of civilization, has been put in question” (444). Also from late in the book, I was surprised to see a reference to Walter Benjamin’s suicide (and that he is described as a “poet” (427). In any case, the point for me is that Serge’s clairvoyance has very little or nothing at all to do with any reading of Marx he has done. Of course this vocabulary is important for him, and he is perfectly capable of class analysis when it is useful, but his background is anarchist and his politics are left-Bolshevik. And here I’m thinking less of the—in themselves very interesting—remarks at the end of the book, for instance the struggle with pessimistic conclusions about the value, never mind utility, of critical intelligence, but of the actual substance of his life as he recounts it.

This is the kind of book I want others to read and think about. I’m not sure that I would assign it to undergraduates—although perhaps it would be possible to excise a really useful 15 pages from it on the early Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War. Serge as a character is on the one hand appealing—intelligent, human, strong-willed in the best possible way. And on the other hand, one wonders. I had to consult the notes before I realized that he’d had three wives—this is how little a part they play in the narrative. At least one is also from, as it were, radical stock, but it’s still difficult to read about the in-laws being made to suffer for the sins of the son-in-law. Serge’s son is a much more fully-drawn character than anyone else in the narrative, certainly than the various wives. But this moral problem—the commitment to uncompromising truth versus the obligation to family—is not something Serge is willing to entertain. Nor indeed could he possibly have done for very long in his own life without wavering much more than he did. Nor are all of his political formulations ones it would be easy to accept today, for instance he is very, it seems to me oddly, aware of who looks Jewish.

Finally, a missed connection, unusual for someone like Serge who seems to have met practically every consequential person in his vicinity. For me one of the only really sour notes in the text was near the end, when he arrives in Martinique and finds “childlike Negroes” who are a “people...still in their infancy” and so unlikely to overthrow the “diluted form of slavery” that Serge quite rightly recognizes there (430). Serge knew André Breton quite well, and stayed with him in Marseilles waiting to get across the Atlantic. Breton does not seem to have been on the boat that took Serge to Martinique (unless I misremember). But Breton came to Martinique in the same period, and there seems to have wandered into a bookshop run by Aimé Césaire and his circle, where he picked up Tropiques and, looking through this locally-printed journal, declared it excellent. This was an important encounter because useful for Césaire and others. I wonder if Serge came into the same bookshop? The margins of empire and the gutters of war indeed.

Leftist Socialism

Kolakowski, Leszek. “The Concept of the Left.” [from The New Left Reader]

How to give the Left a conceptual definition? Leszek Kolakowski begins with a quasi ontological point: “every work of man is a compromise between the material and tool” (144). This principle is as true of dentistry as it is of revolution, “social revolutions are a compromise between utopia and historical reality. The tool of the revolution is utopia, and the material is the social reality on which one wants to impose a new form. And the tool must to some degree fit the substance if the results are not to be ludicrous” (145). Utopia is the negation of a currently existing reality, but it is a constructive negation. Negation is not the same as simply destruction, “the opposite of blowing up a house is not to build a new house but to retain the existing one” (146), and thus we have the space of politics. The Left wants to build a new house, which must be done through critical negation of the existing house. The Right wants to maintain the house just as it is. The two are at loggerheads, except for the moments, tactical and never determined by ideology, when they are united in the desire not to see the house blown up.

Utopia is negation, but not only negation. It is worth giving Kolakowski’s extended definition of the term,

By utopia I mean a state of social consciousness, a mental counterpart to the social movement striving for radical change in the world—a counterpart itself inadequate to these changes and merely reflecting them in an idealized and obscure form. It endows the real movement with the sense of realizing an ideal born in the realm of pure spirit and not in current historical experiences. Utopia is, therefore, a mysterious consciousness of an actual historical tendency. As long as this tendency lives only a clandestine existence, without finding expression in mass social movements, it gives birth to utopias in the narrower sense, that is, to individually constructed models of the world, as it should be. But in time utopia becomes actual social consciousness; it invades the consciousness of a mass movement and becomes one of is essential driving forces. Utopia, then, crosses over from the domain of theoretical and moral thought into the field of practical thinking, and itself begins to govern human action. (146-7)

And this movement, this utopian moment, is an absolutely essential part of the Left. Utopias generate internal contradictions within Left movements, but “the Left cannot do without a utopia. The Left gives forth utopias just as the pancreas discharges insulin – by virtue of an innate law” (147). Just as not all of the Left is utopian, so not all of the Left is revolutionary. But the revolutionary utopia of total change is a necessary part of the Left, because it is a necessary part of significant social change, “utopia is a prerequisite of social upheavals, just as unrealistic efforts are the precondition of realistic ones” (148). You must ask for the stars to receive even a warm bed for the night. This does not mean that in all cases the most radical possible position must be taken, but it does mean that obviously unobtainable demands are an inherent part of the moral existence of the Left.

Left and Right are unavoidably relative terms. One can speak without real difficulty of the Left wing of a Rightist movement. And, indeed, the success of the Left forces it always to change, “as time passes, the Left just define itself ever more precisely. For the more it influences social consciousness, the more its slogans take on a positive aura, the more they are appropriated by the Right and lose their defined meaning. Nobody today opposes such concepts as “freedom” and “equality”; that is why they can become implements of fraud” (150). In the same vein, although we can give a very nice abstract definition of Leftness, for instance as “the degree of participation in the process of social development that strives to eliminate all conditions in which the possibility of satisfying human needs is obstructed by social relations” (150), we cannot remove the manifold contradictions and ambiguities wrapped up in such a general definition.

Rather, we must define the concept of the Left within concrete historical reality. Reality today is marked by two kinds of conflicts, “first of all, class conflicts and, secondarily, political ones” (151). The social world contains many kinds of divisions other than those of class that could give rise to conflict, and further, “classes themselves are becoming more, rather than less, complicated” (151). So, it follows that “political life cannot reflect class conflicts purely and directly but, on the contrary, ever more indirectly and confusedly” (151). And from this it follows that the Left cannot be pegged to the wishes, even the benefit, of the working class, “the Left cannot be defined by saying it will always, in every case, support every demand of the working class, or that it is always on the side of the majority” (151). The intellectual realm is autonomous from the material one, “even though in today’s world there is no leftist attitude independent of the struggle for the rights of the working class, though no leftist position can be realized outside the class structure, and though only the struggle of the oppressed can make the Left a material force, nevertheless the Left must be defined in intellectual, and not class, terms” (151).

Although Kolakowski distinguishes between capitalist and non-capitalist countries, and the utility or force of the distinction might well be worth probing, his laundry-list of positions is much the same for both. Social privilege must go, whatever its source. Colonial oppression and other forms of unequal and exploitative relations between countries must be resisted. Limitations on the freedom of speech are everywhere to be thrown off, and here “the Left fights all the contradictions of freedom that arise in both kinds of social conditions: how far can one push the demand for tolerance without turning against the idea of tolerance itself? How can one guarantee that tolerance will not lead to the victory of forces that will strangle the principle of tolerance? This is the great problem of all leftist movements” (152). In addition to fighting racism and obscurantism in the name of “rational thought,” “the Left strives to secularize social life” (152). The left is willing to use violence, willing to compromise in the concrete when it seems best, “everywhere the Left is ready to compromise with historical facts, but it rejects ideological compromise” (152). Toward reality, “it takes a position of permanent revisionism” (152), while “the Right is the embodiment of the inertia of historical reality” (153). The Left is always willing to grasp reality as it is in the hope of making it how it should be with the aid of a lodestar utopia, its “political ideology,” the Right is incapable of this and “has nothing but tactics” (153). The Left, then, is practically defined as political engagement that does not abandon ideology, so that unlike the Right, it “rejects any means of political warfare that lead to moral consequences which contradict its premises” (153). It follows from this expansive definition that it is impossible to unite into a single political movement all of the Left. There will always, practically by definition although also for practical political reasons, be splinters.

Kolakowski is of course thinking from the specific position of Poland. The Communist Party, then, is the main issue: “For a long time the division into a Party Left and Right did not exist, although some members were more or less to the left…because the Party was deprived of any real political life, because its ideology did not grow out of its own historical experience but was to a large degree imposed upon it” (154). The situation in Poland now is somewhat peculiar, “the forces of the Left stand between two rightist tendencies: the reaction within the Party, and traditional reaction. This is a new historical development, awareness of which has arisen only in the past few years” (155). About this it is pointed out that, “the New Left appeared within the movement when it became apparent that a New Right existed,” without going in to how the old Left moved Right, Kolakowski emphasizes that “it does not seem that this process was caused by the mere fact of the Left’s coming to power…it does not seem that the Left can exist only in a position of opposition, or that the possession of power is incompatible with the nature of the Left and leads inevitably to its downfall” (155). In more poetic language, “the Left protests against the existing world, but it does not long for a void. It is an explosive charge that disrupts the stability of social life, but it is not a movement toward nothingness” (156).

There are many concrete political reasons for the relative weakness of the Left, but the central conceptual reason is that it is always in danger of dissolving into mere moralism. This has to do again with the Left’s ideological commitments. The difference with the Right is definitive, “let us speak openly: contempt for ideology is the strength of the Right because it allows for greater flexibility in practice and for the arbitrary use of any verbal façade that will facilitate the seizure of power” (156). The malleability of the Right means that “it is important for the Left to have available at all times criteria of recognition in the form of attitudes toward those actual political matters which, for one reason or another, force the Right to reveal itself for what it is” (156-7). The ideological danger that faces the Left, its most difficult task, is to resolutely oppose the two kinds of Right, “the Left is in grave danger if it directs its criticism toward only one pressure, for it thus blurs its political demarcations…it must take the same clear rational attitude toward both the sclerotic religiosity of the Stalinist version of Marxism and the obscurantism of the clergy. It must simultaneously reject socialist phraseology as a façade for police states and democratic phraseology as a disguise for bourgeois rule” (157). This returns us to what emerges as Kolakowski’s central point, “the Left’s greatist claim is ideological…it is to differentiate exactly between ideology and current political tactics. The Left does not refuse to compromise with reality as long as compromises are so labeled…While the Left realizes that on occasion it is powerless in the face of crime, it refuses to call crime a ‘blessing’” (157). Put differently, “the intellectual and moral values of communism are not luxurious ornaments of its activity, but the conditions of its existence” (158). Kolakowski calls this position “leftist socialism.”

The Left, then, is a position taken in relation to actually existing society, oriented at every particular turn by utopian dreams that arise out of this reality although they may seem far from it. The Left is therefore permanent. This gives a melancholic and Sisyphean note to Kolakowski’s ending. The Left’s demands are permanently necessary, and so will often enough be defeated, “but such defeats are more fruitful than capitulation. For this reason the Left is not afraid of being a minority…It knows that history itself calls forth in every situation a leftist side which is as necessary a component of social life as its aspect of conservatism and inertia” (158). “The Left the fermenting factor in even the most hardened mass of the historical present…It is…the dynamite of hope that blasts the dead load of ossified systems, institutions, customs, intellectual habits, and closed doctrines. The Left unites those dispersed and often hidden atoms whose movement is, in the last analysis, what we call progress” (158).

Sources of Reaction

Il existe aujourd’hui un genre de fanatisme scientifique qui menace d’être funeste à la science: il ferait tout sauter pour éprouver un explosif, il perdrait un État pour tirer des archives et mettre en lumière un document ‘intéressant’. Ce système anarchique et révolutionnaire est de source métaphysique. Il n’a rien de rationnel. Proprement il consiste à remplacer le dieu des Juifs par la Curiosité, dite improprement la Science, mis sur un autel, faite centre du monde et revêtue des mêmes honneurs que Jéhovah. Cette superstition ne mérite pas plus de respect que les autres. Bien qu’elle soit fort à la mode parmi les savants, Sainte-Beuve ou l’empirisme organisateur lui donne son nom véritable: tantôt passion féconde, tantôt pure monomanie.

Maurras, Charles. Trois idées politiques: Chateaubriand, Michelet, Sainte-Beuve. [1898]

Anti-Constitutionalism

S'ils invoquent l'exécution littérale des adages constitutionnels, ce n'est que pour les violer impunément. Ce sont les lâches assassins qui, pour égorger sans péril la République au berceau, s'efforcent de la garrotter avec des maximes vagues dont ils savent bien se dégager eux-mêmes.

Robespierre, 5 Nivôse II (25 December, 1793)

His body lies a-mouldering

The deed was done. The next day the world knew and the world sat in puzzled amazement. It was ever so and ever will be. When a prophet like John brown appears, how must we of the world receive him? Must we follow out the drear, dread logic of surrounding facts, as did the South, even if they crucify a clean and pure soul, simply because consistent allegiance to our cherished, chosen ideal demands it? If we do, the shame will brand our latest history. Shall we hesitate and waver before his clear white logic, now helping, now fearing to help, now believing, now doubting? Yes, this we must do so long as the doubt and hesitation are genuine; but we must not lie. If we are human, we must thus hesitate until we know the right. How shall we know it? That is the Riddle of the Sphinx. We are but darkened groping souls, that know not light often because of its very blinding radiance. Only in time is truth revealed. To-day at last we know: John Brown was right. (172)

This is the first paragraph of the 12th chapter of W.E.B. Du Bois’ biography of John Brown. The previous chapters narrative briefly Brown’s life and character, at more length his actions in Kansas, and finally, in some evaluative detail, the planning for and execution of the raid on Harper’s Ferry. Du Bois goes quite lightly and quickly over how it is that John Brown decided to devote his and his family’s life to breaking slavery, the main fact is that he did so. Du Bois says, “he was the sword on which struggling Kansas and its leaders could depend, the untarnished doer of its darker deeds, when they that knew them necessary cowered and held their hands” (174). That phrase, “untarnished doer of…dark deeds” is I think the crucial one.

The book is constructed entirely from secondary sources—in this it is something like, although on a very different scale, Black Reconstruction. Also like that work, it is a fine example of committed interpretive historiography. We hear about John Brown’s life, we get a theory of the Alleghenies as the ‘central fact’ of his geographic imagination, we learn that he read up on the Haitian Revolution to learn about guerilla warfare and also, somewhat surprisingly, that his troop read Tom Paine’s The Age of Reason to pass the time (151). Du Bois rejects with some heat the idea that Brown’s plan was from the beginning silly or amateur and destined to pitiful failure. Brown had experience fighting, he knew the terrain, and it was indeed plausible that a well financed guerilla could operate in the Alleghenies striking into the “great black way” of the Shenandoah. That the raid on Harper’s Ferry failed is not itself evidence that it was stupidly or naively conceived.

Although it is not exactly ever said, we understand clearly that the author agrees with Frederick Douglass that Brown’s plan was not likely to succeed. Douglass, Du Bois clearly thinks, was correct that in the end, “only national force could dislodge national slavery” (175). Still, Du Bois emphasizes the final meeting between Douglass and Brown, in which Shields Green, a recent runaway, chooses Brown over Douglass. He cites at length from Douglass’ later recounting of the moment,

“Captain Brown urged us both to go with him, but I could not do so, and could but feel that he was about to rivet the fetters more firmly than ever on the limbs of the enslaved…my discretion or my cowardice made me proof against the dear old man’s eloquence—perhaps it was something of both which determined my course. When about to leave, I asked Green what he had decided to do, and was surprised by his coolly saying, in his broken way, ‘I b’lieve I’ll go wid de old man.’ Here we separated” (149).

Du Bois returns to this later on, in his evaluative chapter. He says, “As it was with Douglass, so it was practically with the Negro race. They believed in John Brown but not in his plan” (175). For all that this book might be called hagiography, Du Bois is perfectly willing to go further than this. The black people who had made it to Canada, with whom Brown was in communication, who he tried to enlist in his band—they knew what slavery was, and what the plantation was, in a way that John Brown, for all his moral firmness, simply could not. And, then, as Du Bois says, “was not their whole life already a sacrifice?” (176). These are hard questions, and it seems to me that Du Bois says what he can, and leaves a great deal up to historical contingency. What if the plan had gone off earlier, as it would have without the interference of Hugh Forbes? It would have had a wider support base among anti-slavery circles, there would have been more on-the-ground support. What if Brown had avoided being trapped in Harper’s Ferry, had made it up into the mountains to start his guerilla war? As it was—and this was important for Du Bois to emphasize in 1909—a number of free blacks did join, and a number of enslaved people did help in the heat of the moment. It mattered, after all, to Du Bois that black men and women (principally, in this narrative, Harriet Tubman) could be the agents of their own emancipation—this is one of the big interventions of Black Reconstruction.

Certainly I am not a historian of the US in the 19th century, so there is much that I’m unable to judge in this book. But I have at least some interest in revolutionary radicals, and it seems to me that Brown and his cohort should be included in any survey of international 19th century revolutionists. He studied Toussaint, he sought advice (although apparently he shouldn’t have) from a man who marched with Mazzini. He was part of the 19th century Revolutionary tradition. One might cite as evidence of this the somewhat bizarre, at least to me, convention called in order to draft a constitutional framework for “the government of a band of isolated people fighting for liberty” (131). Interesting, also, from a more contemporary point of view, is Du Bois’ reproduction of debate over the flag to be flown by this group. Despite some objections, especially from former slaves, Brown insisted that the guerilla should fly the Stars and Stripes (127-133). More difficult to square, I think, with the European Revolutionary tradition with which I’m more familiar is Brown’s religious fundamentalism. He was an anti-slavery egalitarian, indeed—but from his own point of view, he was absolutely engaged in a religious war.

And here is what, in the end, I find so compelling, what I so much want to worry over, about Brown today. It would be difficult today to deny the values, from a certain point of view, for which he fought. Human equality and freedom are so much the definitive words of our political idiom that they are in real danger of being totally voided of meaning. So we can only applaud a struggle in their name. Yet, I think, we cannot avoid the fact that Brown was essentially a militant fundamentalist terrorist. The violence in Kansas seemed to be settling the question in favor of the slave-holders. Indeed, it seemed that peace and at least formal, although absolutely not real, democracy was about to be established. It was at this juncture, if I understand correctly, that in order to push the situation in the better direction, Brown took a group of men out to a settlement that was a hotbed of pro-slavery activity, and began knocking on doors. He had the man of the house dragged outside, taken a little ways away into the woods, and cut down with broadswords. This was repeated at several houses. There is a ritualistic aspect to this violence. It was, in a real sense, blood expiation for the crime of slavery.

Du Bois repeats in several places the somewhat ungainly catchphrase, “the cost of liberty is less than the price of repression” (195), and calls this Brown’s great lesson for ‘our time.’ Really, though, it is only on the very last page of the book that Du Bois gets to the moral and historical claim at the heart of John Brown’s life, at least as he’d written it. Finally he says, “John Brown taught us that the cheapest price to pay for liberty is its cost to-day” (201). This is the temporal fix, this is the anti-liberal claim of the revolutionary at its purest: not tomorrow, today. Without action it will be worse tomorrow, not better.

Edward Said, I think, wrote one of his very last books on the ‘late work,’ that is, works of art made not long before the artist died. Here are John Brown’s last written words, set down the day the state of Virginia hung him: “I, John brown, am quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done” (186).

---------------
I am reading from the 1997 edition under the care of John David Smith in the ‘American History Though Literature’ series. I wish very much that I had the newer edition made for the ongoing Du Bois complete works project. For one thing, the Smith edition—and I blame the publisher not Smith—has a terribly large number of typos. ‘John brown’ is an especially common and egregious one. If I had time, I would look at the Sanborn letters, the more recent Oates biography and/or the much more recent Reynolds one. But I haven’t looked into this much at all yet.

Zizek's Violence

Zizek’s short book Violence (2008) begins with a series of distinctions and delimitations in order to bring into view his proper object.  He distinguishes first between subjective and objective violence.  Subjective violence is the immediate physical, physiological, experience of “violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent” (1).  In contradistinction to this is objective violence, which is distinguished into symbolic and systemic varieties.  Symbolic violence includes hate speech, the various hierarchies inscribed into our daily language (of gender, for instance), but also the “more fundamental form of violence still that pertains to language as such” (2).  Systemic violence is the apparently straightforward designation for “the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems” (2).  The whole point of the book, we are told, is to get away from the “inherently mystifying…direct confrontation” (3-4) with specific acts of subjective violence.  The crude political point is that acts of violence, be they bombings on American soil or genocides committed in a far away African country, are mediatized in such a way as to demand an immediate, and therefore partial, subjective, response.   Zizek’s goal, then, is to examine the background against which the ‘subjective’ violence is rendered just that, subjective rather than objective.  The point is not (only or centrally) to show, once again, that capitalism is built on the violence of expropriation, or that certain categories of individuals are systemically excluded from equal access to certain resources.  As Zizek elaborated at length in his Parallax View, it is the inescapable gap between the objective and subjective that is the space of the subject.  So the point here is to examine the mutual positioning of objective and subjective violence in order to understand what kind of a subject is situated there, and how a different one might arise. 

Put differently, Zizek is interested in sites of resistance.  For instance, in his discussion of tolerance, and the critique of it that sometimes emerges from postcolonial studies, his view of cultural difference is ruled by the consideration of political possibility.  He says,

The self-reflexive sensitivity to one’s own limitation can only emerge against the background of the notions of autonomy and rationality promoted by liberalism.  One can, of course, argue that, in a way, the Western situation is even worse because in it oppression itself is obliterated and masked as free choice…Our freedom of choice effectively often functions as a mere formal gesture of consent to our own oppression and exploitation.  However, Hegel’s lesson that form matters is important here; form has an autonomy and efficacy of its own.  So when we compare a Third World woman, forced to undergo clitoridectomy or promised in marriage as a small child, with the First World woman ‘free to choose’ painful cosmetic surgery, the form of freedom matters—it opens up a space for critical reflection (147-8).

The point that Zizek wants to make, it seems to me, goes beyond the notion that a rhetoric can become a reality, that an appearance to be maintained can become a positive force for change.  He remains, I think, attached to the level of the subject.  He means something more like, without formal freedom, there will be no concrete freedom—but entirely in relation to the individual, not the society. 

This allows us to enter into the terrain that is generally upsetting for readers of Zizek.  For Zizek, the subject becomes free only in the moment of terror.  This moment is the juncture between subjective and objective.  The position here is in some sense a Hegelian one, of course, and a Lacanian one.  But it is more interesting to point out that it is Zizek’s way of suturing ethics into politics.

The key text examined in Violence is Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence.”  The notion Zizek wants to explore is that of divine violence.  Although Zizek isn’t quite willing to say it, it seems to me that he identifies divine violence ultimately with the abyss of human freedom, or we might say more in his own terms, with the terror of the radical emptiness of the subject.  This is where he follows Lacan against Kant, “What is truly traumatic for the subject is not the fact that a pure ethical act is (perhaps) impossible, that freedom is (perhaps) an appearance, based on our ignorance of the true motivations of our acts; what is truly traumatic is freedom itself, the fact that freedom IS possible, and we desperately search for some ‘pathological’ determinations in order to avoid this fact” (196).  Divine violence is Zizek’s way of discussing this same fact of freedom and possibility on the objective level.  Zizek cites a long passage from Benjamin’s “Critique,” and then asserts that divine violence is to be understood as the “domain of sovereignty” (198).  Divine violence is not law-making, but beyond law.  It is, one is tempted to say, immanent and therefore outside the realm of law.  Without law, no crime.  Hence, Zizek says, “It is mythical violence that demands sacrifice, and holds power over bare life; whereas divine violence is non-sacrificial and expiatory.  One should therefore not be afraid to assert the formal parallel between the state annihilation of homini sacer, for example the Nazi killing of the Jews, and the revolutionary terror, where one can also kill without committing a crime and without sacrifice” (199).  This passage has alarmed certain people.  Not without reason.  Zizek then goes on, quoting Benjamin, “Less possible and also less urgent [the implication is, than revolutionary/divine/pure violence itself] for humankind, however, is to decide when unalloyed violence has been realized in particular cases…”  He concludes from Benjamin’s warnings that the instance of divine violence (now fully transformed into revolutionary violence) is not really of the order of Being—and then, I think oddly, he goes on to say that it is rather of the order of Event.  This is odd because the identification, or rather the assertion, of the Event is absolutely crucial in Badiou’s scheme of things.  Zizek compares the event to the miracle that, although it might have empirically verifiable causes, remains for the believer a miracle.  Fine, but a sort of identification none the less plays a crucial role here. 

In the end, though, divine or revolutionary violence comes to have a fairly banal meaning for Zizek.  We might in Rancièrian language say that it is violence erupting from the part of no part, or in Badiou’s terms, from beside the void.  Of course these are not the same thing, and I think that Zizek does not want to exactly endorse either of them.  Rather, for him, divine violence is that which comes from those who are the constitutive outside of the capitalist system.  And here is where the split within the field of objective violence returns.  Divine violence is that which takes place when a subject has risen from subjective freedom into the simultaneous necessities of the symbolic and the structural.  The agent of divine violence is both existentially free (inside the imperious terror of baseless, necessary action), and objectively free (pinioned to the outside of the inflexible wheel of capital).  He says,

Divine violence should thus be conceived as divine in the precise sense of the old Latin motto vox populi, vox dei: not in the perverse sense of ‘we are doing it as mere instruments of the People’s Will,’ but as the heroic assumption of the solitude of sovereign decision.  It is a decision (to kill, to risk or loose one’s own life) made in absolute solitude, with no cover in the big Other.  If it is extra-moral, it is not ‘immoral,’ it does not give the agent license just to kill with some kind of angelic innocence.  When those outside the structured social field strike ‘blindly,’ demanding and enacting immediate justice/vengeance, this is divine violence.  Recall, a decade or so ago, the panic in Rio de Janeiro when crowds descended from the favelas into the rich part of the city and started looting and burning supermarkets.  This was indeed divine violence…They were like biblical locusts, the divine punishment for men’s sinful ways (202).

This last sentence is a bit over the top, forced on Zizek by the example, and not entirely in keeping with the theoretical frame.  Or perhaps it suggests that underneath it all, the content inherited from Marx is in fact just an approach to the moral content of the global economy?

The very last move of Zizek’s book is remarkable, and I think suggests a serious and perhaps significant convergence between him and the authors of Commonwealth.  Zizek goes to Robespierre and Che Guevara, and the notion of revolutionary love.  Commenting on Robespierre, “divine violence belongs to the order of the Event: as such, its status is radically subjective, it is the subject’s work of love” (203), and then further at the end of the chapter, “the notion of love should be given here all its Paulinian weight; the domain of pure violence, the domain outside law (legal power), the domain of the violence which is neither law-founding nor law-sustaining, is the domain of love” (205).  Here is the subjective, I think we must say ethical, side to the more familiar and comprehensive, the more apparently provocative but in fact conventional, claim of Zizek’s that Hitler was not violent enough.  The subject is asked to embrace their own radical brokenness, to assume the gap constitutive of others in an act of terribly violent love.  If this ethical act is accompanied by a genuinely radical politico-economic reconfiguration—if, to emphasize, the twin terrors of both symbolic and systemic objectivity can be assumed in the freedom of the subject—then we will have made revolution.

The second, 2009, edition of In Defense of Lost Causes contains an afterword entitled “What is Divine about Divine Violence?”  It is essentially a clarification and restatement of the ideas presented in Violence—indeed certain sections are simply word-for-word copies (it is also, incidentally, a venue for the continuation of Zizek’s polemic with Simon Critchley).  Although a few examples are operative here, a central one is Haiti.  Zizek follows Susan Buck-Morss in her Hegelian reading of the Revolution a certain distance, but stops at what he calls her “liberal limit” (471).  Her liberalism—and this is not a wrong definition of liberalism—amounts to a rejection of (most) revolutionary activity on the grounds that it will simply make things worse than they already are.  Revolution is thus to be avoided, to be treated as a fearful last resort.  Zizek firmly rejects this.  He suggests that we must, “distinguish as clearly as possible between two types of violence; radical emancipatory violence against the ex-oppressors and the violence which serves the continuation and/or establishment of hierarchical relations of exploitation and domination” (471).  A familiar move.  From this perspective, “we should thus condemn the elimination of all whites in Haiti not out of humanitarian compassion for the innocent among them, but based on the insight that the true strategic goal of this process was to establish a new hierarchical order among the remaining blacks, justified by the ethnic ideology of blackness” (472). Zizek has here the great virtue of stating his position in a clear and unambiguous manner. 

He is simply drawing necessary conclusions from his premises when he says that it is entirely possible and necessary to distinguish between the acts of violence committed by the Tonton Macoutes (Duvalier) and the chimères (Lavalas).  Precisely the same acts, the same mode of inflicting painful death on a human being, has objectively different meanings.  When a murder is committed by the chimères, for Zizek, “these desperate acts of violent popular self-defense are again examples of divine violence: they are to be located ‘beyond good and evil,’ in a kind of politico-religious suspension of the ethical.  Although we are dealing with what, to an ordinary moral consciousness, cannot but appear as ‘immoral’ acts of killing, one has no right to condemn them, since they are the reply to years, centuries even, of systematic state violence and economic exploitation” (478).  He thus arrives at a “minimal definition of divine violence,” that is, “the counter-violence to the excess of violence that pertains to state power” (483).  Then, framing a distinction that is significantly different from the earlier one between emancipator/repressive violence, he says, “if mythic violence serves the state, divine violence doesn’t serve another, better, purpose (such as life) – it doesn’t serve anything, which is why it is divine” (484-5).  It is not too clear how this divine, purposeless violence, lines up with a revolutionary violence that is anti-repressive.  Perhaps the relationship is one of inclusion.  A struggle for freedom is not positive, but rather anti-repressive.  It is therefore not really to any positive purpose.  In this sense it is divine, even though Zizek also sees Nazi genocidal violence as basically divine, but not therefore revolutionary.  So some objective element must enter into the evaluation of purposeless, pure, violence, to distinguish that which is revolutionary from that which is not.  And here again, Zizek is at least very clear.  I think we can assume that the objective element that intervenes to assign violence into the mythic or the divine is the same as that which distinguishes divine-revolutionary from simply divine-sovereign violence.  This is the ethical commitment.  He says, returning to the Haitian example, “chimères and Tonton Macoutes may perform exactly the same act—lynching an enemy—but where the first act is divine, the second is only the ‘mythic’ obscene and illegal support of power.  The risk involved in reading or assuming an act as divine is fully the subject’s own” (485). 

That, I believe, is a fair presentation of what Zizek says about violence in these two recent texts.  My summary has of course had an element of evaluation and criticism, but an adequate contextualization of the arguments in the history of such arguments and in the contemporary political and theoretical contexts would be required to mount a proper critique of the corner into which Zizek has painted himself.  The major issue, it seems to me, is how to reconcile the above justification—or story about how to distinguish justifiable and non-justifiable acts of violence from one another—with what I take to be Zizek’s ‘positive’ political project of subtraction.  Is the analytic here worked out simply a way to think about that violence which is acceptable in pursuing and defending specific instances of subtraction?  Violence ceases to be revolutionary, divine, the moment that it becomes something the revolutionary government wields ‘so that the people do not do it themselves’?  This certainly is the case, but as a criterion it doesn’t go very far.  A fuller account of what Zizek means by subtractive, Bartleby-inspired, politics is required before one could move forward here.  And that’s for another day.   

Magic table

From Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition [1958]:

The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak. What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them. The weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic séance where a number of people gathered around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from their midst, so that two persons sitting opposite each other were no longer separated but also would be entirely unrelated to each other by anything tangible. (pp 52-3)

Cognition, on the other hand, belongs to all, and not only to intellectual or artistic work processes; like fabrication itself, it is a process with a beginning and end, whose usefulness can be tested, and which, if it produces no results, has failed, like a carpenter’s workmanship has failed when he fabricates a two-legged table. (p 171)

At first I thought that these two examples, both employing a table, as she often does, were in contradiction with one another. Now it seems to me rather that while action is not work, work is none the less required to erect the space of action (the disappearing table). It would be worth going back to On Revolution to see if she discusses the actual practical activity of ‘making revolution’ as work. Work, then, could found new politics in a way that labor never could. Makes sense.

Karl Marx, Antisemite

Around the turn of 1843 and 1844, Marx wrote two essays, which it seems to me articulate in contrasting ways themes, or attack problems, to which he would return throughout his life. I have in mind “On the Jewish Question” and “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction.” In both ‘critique’ is mobilized in the service of ‘emancipation,’ although especially the latter is very much up for definition. Obviously, generations of very smart and well read people have looked at these texts and thought about what they mean for Marxism in general. After I’ve had my look, I’m going to be very interested in what other people have to say. But for the moment, here is my own naïve reading.

“On the Jewish Question” is a disagreement with Bruno Bauer. Bauer, says Marx, argues that Jewish emancipation will come only when the Jews have ceased to be Jewish, so that they can participate in the universal project of political emancipation. Marx begins by criticizing Bauer’s notion of political emancipation. He does some very interesting things here, ultimately arguing that what is really at stake is human emancipation, which is quite a different project. In the colorful second part of the essay, we get his full answer: since the essence of Jewishness is the essence of modern egotistical material relations, that is the economy, and the economy is that against which human emancipation must struggle, what must really happen is that society must be liberated from the Jews (or at least Jewishness).

“A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” on the other hand, is about Germany. It contains the famous assertions of Germany’s backwardness, of how the German contribution to politics is in its philosophy. At issue here is German emancipation. Whereas in France, every group feels that it is universal, in Germany, no class is able to do so properly. What is needed, then, is a class the suffering of which is universal, so that when it comes to power, even if it acts only for itself, it acts for all. This is the proletariat.

Much about these essays is surprising. What surprises me most is the specificities that they suggest lie at the origin of Marx’s categories. Could it really be that it was only after encountering the French utopians themselves later in the 1840s that Marx came to think of a genuinely total system? The distance between the German need for the proletariat in 1844 and its world historical role in the Manifesto of 1847—this is striking. Perhaps although Marx is dealing with Germany, really he means the whole world, although it seems as though France is for him a very different situation—or perhaps the point is just that France will approach the proletarian revolution in decorous and beautifully balanced stages, while Germany must have only it or nothing at all? And then, of course, there is the Jew. Now, on one level, I recognize that Marx is standing here with a long tradition in European historiography and social thought that saw (and for some, still sees) ‘the Jews’ as a modernizing force. Jewish ideals, or Jewish economic practices, Jewish social reality—somehow, Jews were a force for political and economic development, the development of individual freedoms and rights. Especially toward the end of the 19^th century, this was a major philosemitic argument. Yet, it is not hard to see how ‘force for political liberalism and modernization’ could be goose-stepped into ‘rootless cosmopolitan agitator.’ So there is Marx (and there is also Nietzsche, you might say). Marx does not yet use the word ‘capital,’ he does not yet seem to have the concept. How seriously are we to take his identification of the acquisitive haggling egoism of the marketplace—and therefore economic modernity—with, as he says, the everyday reality of Jewish life?

In another context, it would be worth walking with some care through Marx’s arguments in “On the Jewish Question,” but for the moment, I only want to cite the last sentences of the first part, what comes just after Marx cites Rousseau on how the founding of a new ‘people’s institution’ is really to change human nature,

All emancipation is reduction of the human world and of relationships to man himself.

Political emancipation is the reduction of man on the one hand to the member of civil society, the egoistic, independent individual, and on the other to the citizen, the moral person.

On when real, individual man resumes the abstract citizen into himself and as an individual man has become a species-being in his empirical life, his individual work and his individual relationships, only when man has recognized and organized his forces propres as social forces so that social force is no longer separated from him in the form of political force, only then will human emancipation be completed.

These passages are from the Penguin Early Writings (p 234). I’m not sure that the translation is perfect (compare). For instance, the word ‘reduction’ is used to render both, in the first sentence, the German ‘Zurückführung’ and in the second sentence the German ‘Reduktion.’ One might also question rendering ‘Kraft’ as ‘force.’ Then, although I don’t want to make too much of this, in the third sentence the English ‘recognized’—a word sure to make one’s ears prick up in these contexts—is used for ‘erkannt.’ The Hegelian word, I think, is ‘anerkennen.’ Enough with the pedantic stuff. The main point is that for Marx, at this moment, emancipation is the end of the political. Or, what is not perhaps the same thing, emancipation is complete when man no longer apprehends social forces in ‘der Gestalt der politischen Kraft.’ Politics is a form of alienation just like religion, and emancipation is its destruction.

Back to the Jews. Marx finally poses the question thus: “what specific social element must be overcome in order to abolish Judaism? For the capacity of the present-day Jew for emancipation is the relation of Judaism to the emancipation of the present-day world. This relation flows inevitably from the special position of Judaism in the enslaved world of today.” The question should not be taken theologically, but practically, “the secular basis of Judaism” is “Practical need, self-interest.” Thus the “secular cult of the Jew” becomes “Haggling. What is his secular God? Money” (236). Giving the best possible reading to this, and perhaps being overgenerous, one might read this as saying that ‘the Jew’ is a collective identity forced on a group of people who have been historically made dependent upon exclusively economic capacities—that is, in the feudal world, they were excluded from the politico-social relations that gave structure to society, relations which, incidentally, Marx analyzes in criticist terms in “Contribution…” The point here is that Marx

Recognize[ses] in Judaism the presence of a universal and contemporary anti-social element whose historical evolution – eagerly nurtured by the Jews in its harmful aspects – has arrived at its present peak, a peak at which it will inevitably disintegrate.

The emancipation of the Jews is, in the last analysis, the emancipation of mankind from Judaism. (237)

…

The contradiction between the practical political power of the Jew and his political rights is the contradiction between politics and financial power in general. Ideally speaking the former is superior to the latter, but in actual fact it is in thrall to it. (238)

Which is to say that although the Jews are nominally at a disadvantage, discriminated against by political power in various ways, in possession of fewer rights—in fact, their power through money is enormous. Reading all of this just after Nietzsche is enlightening. I do not believe that, for instance, historically, the idea of France or ‘frenchness’ has anything like this kind of relation to the idea of ‘the Jew.’ I will look later at Sartre’s essay. One can almost give a good reading (although, to bring in an important rhetorical device of Marx’s, the stench is too great to be mistaken) to the following, “Civil society ceaselessly begets the Jew from its own entrails” (238). And then,

Money is the jealous god of Israel before whom no other god may stand. Money debases all the gods of mankind and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal and self-constituted value of all things. It has therefore deprived the entire world – both the world of man and of nature – of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and existence; this alien essence dominates him and he worships it.

The god of the Jews has been secularized and become the god of the world. Exchange is the true god of the Jew. His god is nothing more than illusory exchange (239).

Marx reads the history of theological Judaism as the Jesuitical (!) justification of self-interest. So we get what, in another context, might be an interesting idea, “the religion of practical need could not by its very nature find its completion in theory but only in practice, precisely because its truth is practice” (240). And so it follows that the Judaism would never really fall out of practice, “since the real essence of the Jew is universally realized and secularized in civil society, civil society could not convince the Jew of the unreality of his religious essence, which is nothing more than the ideal expression of practical need” (241). All of which is why, in the end, in what I take to be a radicalization of Bauer’s thesis, the social (as opposed to political) emancipation of the Jews is equal to “the emancipation of society from Judaism” (241).

Germany, in its actually existing state, is beneath criticism. Marx’s language is very powerful here. In trying to think about what ‘critique’ might mean in general, and specifically now, it seems to me reasonable to compare the situation today to the relation in which Marx claimed that it stood to the actual political reality of Germany in 1844, “But war on conditions in Germany! By all means! They are below the level of history, they are beneath all criticism, but they remain an object of criticism, in the same way as the criminal who is beneath the level of humanity remains an object for the executioner…Criticism is no longer an end in itself, but simply a means. The essential force that moves it is indignation and its essential task is denunciation” (246). Critique, it seems to me, finding that denunciation and indignation got boring, has moved back to suggesting that it can generate change by being its own end. That is, critique wants to make revolution and posits itself as the empty destroying revolutionary force—that which, when it takes power, is fully universal because purely negative. If there are those who feel that this is basically a capitulation to capital…The reversal, or stopping-up, of the practice of enlightenment is also of interest: “the important thing is not to permit the German a single moment of self-deception or resignation. The actual burden must be made even more burdensome by creating an awareness of it. The humiliation must be increased by making it public” (247).

At this point, Marx’s discussion of revolution is remarkably voluntaristic. He says, “if one class is to be the class of liberation per excellence, then another class must be the class of overt oppression” (254). In France, it was and to some extent remains the nobility and the clergy who stood as oppressors. No class in Germany has the moral energy to fill this role; also lacking is a class with the “breadth of spirit… [the] genius which can raise material force to the level of political power, that revolutionary boldness,” that would allow it to claim the universal for itself. Rather, in a striking phrase that must excite literary critics to no end, and perhaps made Lukacs feel that his preparations had all been worth it, “the relationship of the different spheres of German society is therefore epic rather than dramatic” (255).

The comparison is to France. There, “it is enough to be something for one to want to be everything.” Here, Marx sees France going through, modeling, a series of political revolutions and partial emancipations, whereas, for Germany, there can be only one. He says,

In France partial emancipation is the basis of universal emancipation. In Germany universal emancipation is the conditio sine qua non of any partial emancipation [what about the Jews?]. In France it is the reality, in Germany the impossibility, of emancipation in stages that must give birth to complete freedom. In France each class of the people is a political idealist and experiences itself first and foremost not as a particular class but as the representative of social needs in general. The role of emancipator therefore passes in a dramatic movement from one class of the French people to the next, until it finally reaches that class which no longer realizes social freedom by assuming certain conditions external to man and yet created by human society, but rather by organizing all the [pgbrk] conditions of human existence on the basis of social freedom. In Germany, however, where practical life is as devoid of intellect as intellectual life is of practical activity, no class of civil society has the need and the capacity for universal emancipation unless under the compulsion of its immediate situation, of material necessity and of its chains themselves.

So where is the positive possibility of German emancipation?

This is our answer. In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere which has a universal character because of its universal suffering and which lays claim to no particular right because the wrong it suffers is not a particular wrong but wrong in general; a sphere of society which can no longer lay claim to a historical title, but merely to a human one, which does not stand in one-sided opposition to the consequences but in all-sided opposition to the premises of the German political system; and finally a sphere which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from – and therefore emancipating – all the other spheres of society, which is, in a word, the total loss of humanity and which can therefore redeem itself only through the total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society as a particular class is the proletariat. (255-6)

To sum up what it seems to me has so far happened. The vision of Marxist revolution as we have come to recognize it—inevitable, catastrophic, redemptive, carried by a universal class forced into action by their own radical dispossession—as it would be articulated in the Manifesto and elsewhere, originally applied to Germany in contrast to France. The revolution was to take place in Germany. The universal condition that, ultimately, strips the proletariat of its humanity and therefore renders it capable of redeeming humanity in general through revolution—is the spirit of Jewishness. Is it not the case, then, that the entire movement of Marx’s thought begins with the drama of German and Jew? And further, that for him the drama concludes when the German eliminates the Jew?