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STEPS TOWARD A MARXIST by John Locop

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Wilkes Honors College in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of in Liberal Arts and with a Concentration in

Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University Jupiter, Florida April 2019

STEPS TOWARD A MARXIST HUMANISM

by John Locop

This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate’s thesis advisor, Dr. Nicholas Baima, and has been approved by the members of his supervisory committee. It was submitted to the Faculty of The Honors College and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences.

SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: ______Dr. Nicholas Baima ______Dr. Christopher Ely ______Dean Ellen Goldey, Wilkes Honors College ______Date

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ABSTRACT

Author: John Locop

Title: Steps Toward a Marxist Humanism

Institution: Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University

Thesis Advisor: Dr. Nicholas Baima

Degree: Bachelors of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences

Concentration: Philosophy

Year: 2019

The historical connections between and humanism are diverse and at times, contradictory. Contemporary debates within the Marxist continue to revolve around questions regarding the proper attitude toward humanism and its universalizing implications. To state the problem as a question, “If a Marxist Humanism is possible, with what problems, convictions, concepts etc. should one be concerned in order to create a Marxist Humanist project?” This thesis draws out problems and solutions raised by different trends in the of Marxist thought which attempt to deal with humanism in order to propose a few steps forward for Marxist Humanism.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1

Chapter 1 - Marxist Humanism and …………………………………………………..4

Chapter 2 - Marxist Humanism Defending the ……………………………………15

Chapter 3 - Marxism, Humanism, and ……………………………………………..27

Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………………...42

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Introduction

“As for socialist humanism, it can see itself not only as a critique of the contradictions of bourgeois humanism, but also and above all as the consummation of its ‘nobles’ aspirations. Humanity’s millenarian dreams, prefigured in the drafts of past , Christian and bourgeois, at last find realization in it: in man and between men, the reign of Man will at last begin.”1 -

“There is no refugee crisis. There is, however, a crisis of humanism in Europe and North America.” -Vijay Prashad

In 1964, Louis Althusser published his now famous critique of Soviet socialist humanism. With bitter sarcasm, he demonstrated the irony of the ’ newly adopted vision of the future: that it sought to fulfill the dreams of liberal humanism. Althusser was not the last thinker on the left to deal with humanism, no matter the power of his argument. As a matter of fact, it seems that something about our historical moment has left contemporary progressive thinkers preoccupied by questions about humanist ideas. Vijay Prashad has raised the concern that our world is currently having a “crisis of humanism,” that our country is suffering from a case of

“iron in the soul.” Samir Amin, on the hand, proposes a form of humanism which must universalize itself in order to build and overcome reactionary . Cedric

Robinson, meanwhile, proposes that the Marxist tradition is fundamentally limited by

Eurocentrism, preventing it from forming a universal revolutionary . In view of this diversity of positions on Marxism and its relation to humanism, how are we to make sense of

1 Louis Althusser, . (London: Verso, 2005), 231 1 recent developments in leftist thought regarding humanism? Can humanism, in its implicit universalizing aspirations be reconciled with the history of class struggle?

The materialist outlook of may seem to suggest that Marxists should condemn idealist such as humanism altogether. However, for Althusser, it was not a simple matter of condemnation or acceptance.2 To try and defeat humanism by way of condemnation would be itself an idealist move; to know an , for Marx, it is necessary to understand the social and material conditions that give rise to it.3 Therefore, dealing a rhetorical blow to humanism does nothing in itself to defeat it. Similarly, to embrace the ideas of humanism would do nothing to give it strength in the real world. Neither approach to humanism takes into account the forces that grant the ideology its power. In an attempt to synthesize the best of Marxism and humanism, the socialist-humanists abandoned one for the other. In this manner, the Bolsheviks simultaneously made a wrong theoretical move and blinded themselves to their mistake. Through the example of the Bolsheviks’ idealist turn, Althusser indicates the problem at hand for Marxists confronted with humanism; they analyze humanism on its own idealist terms, abstracted from historical .

In what follows, I will attempt to situate contemporary left discussions of humanism in terms of their historical conditions. Thus, I will connect the works of thinkers like Prashad and

Amin with those of the Marxist humanists of the past, showing the ways in which their

2 “When (eventually) a Marxist policy of humanist ideology, that is, a political attitude to humanism, is achieved – a policy which may be either a rejection or a critique, or a use, or a support, or a development, or a humanist renewal of contemporary forms of ideology in the ethico-political domain this policy will only have been possible on the absolute condition that it is based on Marxist philosophy, and a precondition for this is theoretical anti-human-ism.” Ibid., 231 3 “Marx never believed that a of the nature of money (a social relation) could destroy its appearance, its form of – a thing, for this appearance was its very , as necessary as the existing . Marx never believed that an ideology might be dissipated by a knowledge of it: for the knowledge of this ideology, as the knowledge of its conditions of possibility, its structure, of this specific and of its practical role, within a given society, is simultaneously knowledge of the conditions of its necessity.” Ibid., 230 2 philosophical stances bear the marks of their social and material conditions of possibility. That is to say; I will examine how the humanism with which the left is now concerned took form, not only in books but in the development of history.

In Chapters 1 and 2, I will focus on earlier forms Marxist humanism, mediated by their then-crucial political stance on the Soviet Union. I employ this lens in order to observe these humanisms in the context from which they were birthed. That is to say, the context of sectarian struggle within and between different Marxist organizations over the question of alliance with existing socialist states. This context is crucial given the material consequences of foreign aid, government repression, etc. which helped to form the conditions under which different Marxist humanisms were created. In Chapter 3, I will look at more contemporary anti-racist and anti- colonial forms of Marxist and materialist theory (largely free from the question of the Soviets due to their time) which confront and pose challenges to the project of creating a Marxist humanism for today’s left. Then I will draw conclusions concerning the possibility of a Marxist

Humanism today.

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Chapter 1 - Marxist Humanism and Trotskyism “ as the positive transcendence of private as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire of previous development. This communism, as fully developed , equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self- confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.”4 -, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 “In personal socialist humanism, the Soviet Union accepts on its own account the supersession of the period of the dictatorship of the , but it also rejects and condemns the ' abuses ' of the latter, the aberrant and ' criminal ' forms it took during the period of the 'cult of personality '. Socialist humanism, in its internal use, deals with the historical reality of the supersession of the dictatorship of the proletariat and of the ' abusive ' forms it took in the U.S.S.R.”5 -Louis Althusser, For Marx

The humanist strain running through the Marxist tradition centers itself around a few key propositions: 1) there is a fundamental and more or less positive essence to human , 2) the fundamental essence of humanity has been lost as a result of , and 3) the purpose of the

Marxist project is to retake the lost essence of humanity through the class struggle. These foundational claims of the Marxist Humanist view can be found in an early work of Marx, quoted above. Marxist Humanism set down roots in the United States and Britain in the aftermath of the death of Stalin in 1953. The newly instated Khrushchev leadership went about its efforts to “destalinize” Soviet society, circulating information about authoritarian practices instituted under Stalin’s leadership. Dissident communists outside the USSR who were aligned with Trotsky took the opportunity to bolster their criticism of the Bolshevik Party. With the

4 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959), 43 5 Althusser, For Marx, 237 4 publication of Marx’s early writings in the 1960s, Trotskyist thinkers synthesized an interpretation of Marxism claiming loyalty to the teachings of and Karl Marx, but opposed to the Soviet system. In what follows, I will outline the work of a few notable thinkers related to the Trotskyist tradition in order to draw out philosophical themes which they share in common and contextualize them within their respective political struggles.

Raya Dunayevskaya

Russian philosopher was a prominent popularizer of the idea of a Marxist form of humanism. In direct opposition to Althusser, Dunayevskaya asserted that the humanist themes of Marx’s early works were not naïve liberal impulses to be later abandoned, but rather consistent themes central to the critique of capitalism. Dunayevskaya demonstrates this link between the early and late Marx by pointing to Volume 1 wherein the author pioneers the concept of variable capital – that is, human labor capacity abstracted and quantified as inputs necessary for production:

Variable capital is labor power in the actual process of production. It does undergo a

variation in the magnitude since it reproduces not only its own value, but an unpaid

surplus. In a word, the laborer cannot quit work when he sees he has already produced the

equivalent of his wages because the factory clock says it is only noon, and not quitting

time. Marx is most specific and adamant about naming both of

capital.6

6 Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxism and Freedom: From 1776 until Today, (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2000), 113 5

The treatment of human labor as a mere factor of production, central to the development of capitalism is, for Dunayevskaya, evidence of Marx injecting humanism into his critique of . The centrality of the concept of variable capital is expressed in terms of alienation – the material and social separation of the people from their natural propensity to work

(adapt to and change their environment) by the appropriation of the surplus by the capitalist class. This alienation, as a psychological and socioeconomic phenomena, according to

Dunayevskaya, is the heart of capitalism’s immorality: “The basic contradictions of capitalism cannot be overcome until what is most degrading of all, and the cause of all other contradictions

– alienated labor – is overcome…”7 Given the necessity of alienation to the capitalist production process, old forms of social organization (economic and cultural phenomena) are swept aside, making possible new forms of organization. This simultaneous negation of the old society and conception of the new is, for Dunayevskaya, the political-economic process which promises a new humanism:

Thus the development of capitalism itself creates the basis of a new Humanism… It is

because Marx based himself on this Humanism, more popularly called ‘the inevitability

of socialism,’ that he would discern the law of motion of capitalist society, the

inevitability of its collapse. The Humanism of CAPITAL runs like a red thread

throughout the work.8

The centrality of human beings to Marxism, Dunayevskaya claims, is the very thing which distinguishes it from other forms of socialism, which took bourgeois political economic ideas as the given reality:

7 Ibid., 59 8 Ibid., 125 6

The failure of Ricardian theory to explain the exchange between labor and capital and

labor, on the basis of its own primary law of labor value, it meant the disintegration of the

school. It was a fatal failure for it could not explain how it is that labor – the source and

creator of all values – becomes poorer the more value the worker creates. Utopian

socialism could move nowhere because it remained a prisoner of the economic categories

of Ricardo.9

Here, she echoes comparisons made by Engels in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. However, one shouldn’t expect Dunayevskaya to simply repeat the ideas of Marxist thinkers without criticism.

Dunayevskaya’s humanist theory is as political as it is theoretical; her lifelong critique of actually existing socialism rested upon the idea that self-avowed Marxist governments, from the

Soviet Union to China, supplanted humanity with rigid economic plans dictated from above.

Moreover, Dunayevskaya was directly involved in American communist , working in the

CPUSA’s youth division for much of the 1920s and serving at one point as Trotsky’s secretary.

While she left the CPUSA for the Trotskyist movement in 1928, Dunayevskaya later made a political break with Trotsky, seeing his criticism of the Soviet Union as too moderate. In view of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which formed an agreement of non-aggression between the Nazis and the Soviets, Trotsky declared that the Soviet Union was still a worker’s state, in spite of its degeneration into bureaucracy. In Dunayevskaya’s view, the Soviet Union was not a society of the workers, but a new kind of bourgeois society, which she called “.”10 By the time of Stalin’s death and Mao’s victory in the Chinese Civil War, Dunayevskaya levelled this

9 Ibid., 108 10 News and Letters Committee, “Biography of an Idea”. News and Letters. July 25th, 1987, 6 7 criticism at both the Soviets and the : “But we must not let the fact that both contestants (Mao and Khrushchev) call themselves Communist hide their class nature: both are capitalistic to the marrow of their bones. State-capitalism changes the form, not the content, of these totalitarian regimes.”11 The development of capitalism in was not, in

Dunayevskaya’s view, a historical necessity; against Engels, she contended that there did not exist any single line of development for all societies. Dunayevskaya even goes so far as to distinguish Engels’ view of the development of history from that of Marx. In this manner,

Dunayevskaya’s work is committed to the notion that Marx proposed a consistent theory which has been distorted by its followers by removing the aspects which make it unique.

E.P. Thompson

British writer and educator E.P. Thompson spent much of his life writing Marxist Humanist and teaching free classes on Marxism for the labor movement. Like Dunayevskaya,

Thompson saw the Soviet Union abandoning humanist principles that were inherent to Marxism.

In order to describe the exact historical and material conditions of Soviet life which caused and resulted from the Bolsheviks’ betrayal of Marxism, he developed a concept he called

“.” The Stalinist system, for Thompson, was born from the development of a new bureaucratic class which exploits the workers by administrating a heavily regulated form of capitalism. Stalinism was the result of many intense social and material pressures exerted upon the newborn Soviet socialism, ranging from the armed force of the enemies of communism to

Russia’s history of economic underdevelopment and cultural backwardness to the everyday necessity of secrecy and self-denial for the survival of communist organizers in the class war.

11 Dunayevskaya. Marxism and Freedom, 289 8

Nonetheless, for Thompson, the human center of history never disappeared from the Russian socialist movement. In the end, it was the active decision of the Bolshevik leadership to submit their principles to the force of circumstance. The human side of this surrender of principles manifested in the psychological changes in the Bolshevik cadres. This change was noted by

Stalin as a , while even when the need for harsh discipline, once essential, lost its usefulness:

Men lived in exile, underground, in daily fear of arrest… Such facts emphasise the

crucible within which Stalinism – with its emphasis on hard, completely selfless,

unbreakable, steel-like qualities – was cast. Stalin, over Lenin’s bier, was engaging in

neither rhetoric nor hypocrisy: ‘We communists are people of a particular cut. We are cut

out of particular stuff.’ Men were killed, betrayed, deserted: only the Party went on.12

As a result, the communist party’s more authoritarian organizing tactics, once a matter of need, morphed into willful cultural conservatism, anti-intellectualism, and police-state methods of governance: “Stalinism found the institutional forms by eliminating opposition, imposing bureaucratic control over all activities, and destroying (both within and without

Russia) within the Communist Party, under the rigid structure of ‘democratic centralism.’”13 Under Stalinism, Thompson argues, a form of capitalist alienation takes hold of the human mind so that one loses sense of personal and sees life and history as a mechanical process wherein challenges to the state through independent thought and criticism are illusions:

12 E.P. Thompson, E.P. Thompson and the Making of the , (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014), 65. 13 Ibid., 55 9

The conscious processes of intellectual conflict were seen not as agencies in the making

of history but as an irritating penumbra of illusions, or imperfect reflections, trailing

behind economic forces. The ideas of critics of opponents were, and are, seen as

symptoms of bourgeois conspiracy or penetration, targets for abuse, or fear, or

suspicion.14

Stalinism was, for Thompson, quite opposed to the Marxist Humanist framework wherein the workers’ movement is a radical exercise of the proletariat’s power in the shaping of history. In

Thompson’s own words:

I hold fast to the view that men are on the margin where pre-history ends and conscious

history begins. We will need all our nerve if we are to cross that threshold… A society

without opposed classes will not be a society without social friction of many sorts… It

will not lift from men’s shoulders the responsibility, collectively and as individuals, to

take actions and make choices in pursuit of the “good life.” But it will free the act of

choice from the dictation of necessity, from the history-old inheritance of the blind,

involuntary oppression and wasteful contests of economic self-interest within which all

choices have been made.15

Thus, for Thompson, proletarian victory in the class struggle is not only the victory of the workers over their class enemies, but also the liberation of human beings from economic need and the construction, for the first time, of un-coerced choice. Thinking within this framework,

Thompson involved himself in a kind of socialist politics independent of the Soviet communists.

This independent socialism manifested most clearly in the form of the Campaign for Nuclear

14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 100 10

Disarmament, which conducted left-wing political organizing in the labor unions and non- alignment in the Cold War.

Hal Draper

Under the influence of Trotskyist thinkers such as and in the midst of the

Berkeley Free Speech Movement, American activist organized independent socialist clubs and papers which aligned themselves in opposition to both U.S. capitalism and Soviet communism. Like Raya Dunayevskaya, Hal Draper saw a continuous line of humanist thought running through the works of Karl Marx. As against the utopian socialists and most Marxist political parties, Draper believed that Marx was at the core a “democratic extremist” who upheld values such as freedom of the press and free speech against repression, a commitment he formed through his confrontation with Prussian despotism as a journalist:

Marx entered active political life at the age of twenty-four as a liberal democratic

journalist, the champion of political democracy. This period opens at the beginning of

1842 when he wrote his first published political article, and closes toward the latter part

of the following year, when he became a communist. The development in between, which

transformed him from a radical-democratic liberal into a revolutionary-democratic

communist, is centered around his work for the (RZ) of Cologne, of

which he became editor in October 1842.16

This commitment to a humanist and democratic form of Marxism inspired Drapers’ effort to radically reevaluate Marx’s philosophy, resulting in the many-volume series Karl Marx’s Theory

16 Hal Draper. Karl Marx’s Theory of I. State and Bureaucracy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 31 11 of Revolution (KMTR). The KMTR expressed a life-long and rigorous interrogation of Marxism not just as theory but also as political practice, not only in the Third World but also at home. At the same time that he condemned socialist movements abroad for their politics of lock-step discipline, Draper pointed out similar tendencies on the U.S. left. For Draper, the repression of dissent could strangle socialism in many ways – both through overbearing government and through the stunting of intellectual growth in social movements. In Draper’s “Anatomy of the

Micro-Sect,” he criticizes the U.S. Trotskyist movement for its hyper-sectarian obsession with the theoretical correctness and its structural inability to grow. For Draper, the problems of

Trotskyism resulted largely from the dehistoricization of the Bolshevik movements’ victory in

Russia. Chief among these abstractions from history was the notion that the Bolsheviks started out and evolved at every point as an exclusive and disciplined organization, similar to a conspiracy. Rather, Draper claims, the Bolsheviks developed out of an ideologically broad movement which refined its ideas through open debate and criticism, much of which was centered in the newspaper Iskra:

Historically, this job has been done most often and most successfully by a paper or other

publication of a socialist political center which is organized simply as an editorial board

or other editorial enterprise. (Iskra was only one of dozens of examples of how this was

done as socialist movements came into existence all over the world.) Historically, also,

political centers of this sort have frequently undertaken organizing functions as their

influence spread, the organizing being the product or by-product of the work of its agents

and representatives. (Iskra agents were the organizing arms of the first Leninist center.)

The point would be utterly lost if these enterprises were to be considered merely literary

enterprises in the usual bourgeois sense. There is a continuous line which has carried

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such political centers from their function as producers of “literature” to their role as

centers for the stimulation of organization in one form or another.17

Trotskyists (along with most other U.S. socialists) formed groups based on strict theoretical unity rather than common class interest and thus excluded the healthy practice of debate from the very beginning and alienated themselves from their real organizing conditions as well as potential recruits and other socialists. In this manner, the prospect of a center – a common ground for discussion for the sake of organizing – was excluded from the socialist groups in the U.S. While the Bolsheviks put in years of grass-roots labor and cultural organizing in reciprocal relation with the development of Marxist theory, the U.S. socialists put theory first, rendering their efforts impotent and isolated. In response to the sectarianism of the left-wing movement, Draper organized socialist discussion groups as well as publications for socialist theory. These venues for debate were, for Draper, essential for the U.S. socialist movement to gain its bearings; the organizers did not need to follow a script derived from the Russian , but rather to become aware of their own particular circumstances and adapt accordingly.

Conclusion

The Trotskyist proponents of Marxist Humanism mobilized concepts found in the work of the to critique the Soviet system and the politics which emanated from it. In their view, the politics of the Bolsheviks and their followers treated the human element of history as secondary to non-human historical or economic processes. This position of criticizing the

17 Hal Draper. “The Political Center”, Anatomy of the Micro-Sect. (unpublished, circulated 1973) ed. Einde O’Callaghan. Marxists’ Internet Archive https://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1973/xx/microsect.htm

13 apparent non-humanism of other communist organizations was reflected in the Trotskyist’s attitude toward criticizing actually existing socialism in general. Unlike Maurice Merleau-Ponty

(whom I will discuss in the next chapter), for example, whose humanism was motivated by the fear that leftist criticism would aid in NATO aggression against the Soviet Union, the Trotskyists had such great faith in the agency of the Soviet workers that they called for another revolution in the socialist states. One might be tempted, on the grounds of Merleau-Ponty’s argument, to consider the Trotskyist critique individualist. However one feels about this critique, the historical context of Trotskyism allows us to see that the Trotskyists were fundamentally concerned with the disappearance of the individual from the minds of Marxists as well as the degree of democracy within the socialist movement.

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Chapter 2 - Marxist Humanism Defending the Soviet Union

Up until the failure of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, the USSR held a hegemonic position in the world communist movement from which it could extend or deny aid to Marxist organizations abroad, largely on the basis of ideological unity with the Soviet Communist Party.

Other than the desire for foreign assistance, however, there were other motivations for left organizers and thinkers to defend the Soviet Union - namely, the in the potential for class struggle to realize humanist ideals. In this chapter, I will sketch out variations of Marxist

Humanism which were mobilized in defense of the Bolshevik Revolution. My focus will generally remain on works by Georg Lukacs (History and Class ) and Maurice

Merleau-Ponty (Humanism and Terror). I will contextualize the arguments that these works propose in relation to their historical and practical significance for Marxist Humanism.

Marxist Humanism in Lukacs

History and appeared only a few years after the and the Spartacist Uprising, both struggles led by Marxists whom Lukacs very much admired. It is in this context of early 20th-century socialist revolution that Lukacs puts forth an attack against elements and tendencies of the international communist movement which are fixated upon theory and neglectful of political action. Lukacs opposes the theoretical and practical strengths shown by Spartacist leader to “the bourgeois and opportunistic currents in the workers’ movement that glorified a conception of knowledge which was

15 ostensibly objective but was in fact isolated from any sort of .”18 This attack on bourgeois as abstract and impractical is the center of the book. Following up on this attack,

Lukacs illustrates in Marxist fashion the material and social obstacles to a genuinely socialist epistemology and . In the process, Lukacs formulates Marxist of knowledge and history upon humanist principles.

Lukacs builds his humanist approach to Marxist philosophy on a concept he calls

“.” Referencing the final section in Chapter 1 of Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Lukacs says:

What is centrally important here is that because of this situation (capitalism) a man’s own

activity his own labour becomes something objective and independent of him something

that controls him by virtue of an autonomy alien to him… Objectively a world of objects

and relations between things springs into being (the world of commodities and their

movements on the market) The laws governing these objects are indeed gradually

discovered by man, but even so they confront him as invisible forces that generate their

own power. The individual can use his knowledge of these laws to his own advantage,

but he is not able to modify the process by his own activity. Subjectively - where the

market economy has fully developed - a man’s activity becomes estranged from himself,

it turns into a which, to the non-human of the natural laws

of society, must go its own way independently of man just like any other consumer

article.19

18 Georg Lukacs. History and Class Consciousness, 2nd ed. trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1921), xviii

19 Ibid., 86-87

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In other words, reification is the situation that arises when the market economy reshapes people’s lives in the commodity form and installs the market as the arbiter of their decisions. This phenomenon is twofold, having both material and mental dimensions. Materially, the conditions of reification structure a person’s decision-making strictly within the limits of the market’s abilities. Mentally, this set of conditions appears as one’s freedom being sold and sent away from oneself. In both these dimensions of reification, human freedom is removed from individuals and bestowed upon the material processes of the capitalist system.

Freedom, for Lukacs, is the lost essence of humanity which must be retaken from the market. This is not, for Lukacs a mere moral objection to the state of working people under capitalism. It is an evaluation of the proletariat’s current material and psychological state. In this manner, the concept of reification grounds Lukacs’s practical injunction to the to take power and thus reappropriate its human freedom. Success in the task of retaking this freedom is dependent upon the attainment of what Lukacs calls “class consciousness”:

Now class consciousness consists in fact of the appropriate and rational reactions

‘imputed’ to a particular typical position in the process of production. This consciousness

is, therefore, neither the sum nor the average of what is thought or felt by the single

individuals who make up the class. And yet the historically significant actions of the class

as a whole are determined in the last instance in the last resort by this consciousness and

not by the thought of the individual - and these actions can be understood only by

reference to this consciousness.20

20 Ibid., 51

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The concept of class consciousness is not, for Lukacs, a psychological description of the thoughts and emotions of the class’s individual members but rather a guide to the class as a rational actor in the struggle against its adversaries. In this manner, Lukacs proposes that class consciousness is the awareness of a of its objective situation within a society, i.e. the opposition between itself and the other classes as well as the significance of the class struggle to the whole of society. Class consciousness is thus an epistemological matter for the partisans of a given class - for some an asset, and for others a burden. The capitalist class, for Lukacs, is one party which can suffer from the possession of class consciousness:

For the was quite able to perfect its fundamental , its own science of

classes: the reef on which it foundered was its failure to discover even a theoretical

solution to the problem of crises. The fact that a scientifically acceptable solution does

not exist is of no avail. For to accept that solution, even in theory, would be tantamount to

observing society from a class standpoint other than that of the . And no class

can do that - unless it is willing to abdicate its power freely.21

Lukacs characterizes the bourgeoisie as, in a general sense, willfully blind to its situation. Rather than recognize the inherent contradictions of the capitalist system, the capitalist class is compelled to distort its own consciousness, even at the theoretical level of political economy:

“the position held by the capitalist class and the interests which determine its actions ensure that it will be unable to control its own system even in theory.”22 For Lukacs, this distortion of the fundamental facts of the class struggle so as to believe that class society is permanent is “false”

21 Ibid., 53-54

22 Ibid., 62

18 consciousness (essentially the opposite of class consciousness).23 While the proletariat is capable of having , it is more harmful to the class than it is helpful. Lukacs asserts that there is a in relationship to class consciousness for the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is rooted in the different interests they hold in the class struggle. For the bourgeoisie, class consciousness and the class’s interests contradict one another because the real persistence of crisis is in contradiction with sustainment of the capitalist system. Meanwhile, for the proletariat, class consciousness is a necessary condition of its victory in the struggle.

A Marxist Humanist epistemology emerges from Lukacs’s view of reification and class consciousness. This epistemology aims to answer the question of stepping outside the limits impressed upon one’s mind through reification. In other words, “how can one look at the world from a class-conscious perspective?” The foundational assertion of Lukacs’s epistemology is that

“the developing tendencies of history constitute a higher reality than the empirical ‘facts’.”24 By this it is meant that the Marxist perspective privileges constant historical processes over individual things abstracted from their social context. In the context of capitalist society, the processes at hand are the “unbroken process of… production and reproduction” of capital, i.e. the everyday exploitation of labor for profit.25 Theoretical knowledge that there are certain cruel conditions that mark the capitalist system is not sufficient for Lukacs. Indeed, the false consciousness that is so beneficial to the bourgeoisie (as well as its political economic theories) frame historical phenomena as abstracted facts. The “falseness” of false consciousness is not the falsity of given “facts” but the lack of which results from their abstraction from

23 Ibid., 54

24 Ibid., 181

25 Ibid.

19 systemic processes. Conversely, it is coming to terms with the working class’s state of affairs as an ongoing process which lays the groundwork of class consciousness:

By aware of the commodity relationship the proletariat can only become

conscious of itself as the object of the economic process. For the commodity is produced

and even the worker in his quality as commodity, as an immediate producer is at best a

mechanical driving wheel in the machine. But if the reification of capital is dissolved into

an unbroken process of its production and reproduction, it is possible for the proletariat to

discover that it is itself the subject of this process even though it is in chains and is for the

time being unconscious of the fact.26

In the process of building class consciousness, the mechanistic and reified view of society

(which disguises historically contingent conditions as natural and given and puts the workers in the position of objects) is supplanted by a dialectical one which shows the workers as not just the object but also the agent of capitalist production. This change in consciousness is for Lukacs the recognition that the reappropriation of human freedom is possible.

Marxist Humanism in Merleau-Ponty

Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote his Humanism and Terror just after the end of World War II under the looming threat of war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Seeing his contemporaries criticizing Soviet violence and authoritarianism, Merleau-Ponty aimed to point

26 Ibid.

20 out a fundamental hypocrisy in Western . While critics of the Soviet Union often employed humanist notions about the universal rights and of all people, they failed to address the ways in which the soon-to-be NATO member states had long ago institutionalized the violation of humanist principles, and in so doing pushed the two greatest world powers in the direction of war.

Merleau-Ponty thus mounted a defense of Marxist philosophy, seeing in the tradition a robust approach to the philosophy of history and the of politics as well as a genuine aspiration toward the fulfillment of humanist principles. This defense is grounded for Merleau-

Ponty in the way Marxist method looks at means and ends:

Marxism in principle denies any conflict between the exigencies of realism and those of

ethics since the so-called "ethics" of capitalism is a mystification, and the power of the

proletariat is in reality what the bourgeois apparatus is only nominally. Marxism is no

immorality but rather the determination not to consider virtues and ethics only in the

heart of each man but also in the coexistence of men. The alternative posed between the

actual and the ideal is transcended in the concept of the proletariat as the concrete vehicle

of values.27

In this concretization of values in the political struggle of the working class, Merleau-Ponty claims, Marxism breaks through the dichotomies of means and ends, and realism, etc. In this way, Marxism goes above any charges of being cynical and Machiavellian. Moreover,

Marxism transcends the subjective/objective distinction by taking a perspective grounded in the relations between people rather than the good of the individual. In fact, Merleau-Ponty considers

27 Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Humanism and Terror. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, trans. John O’Neil), 125-126

21 the liberal notion of the individual as a lifeless abstraction, robbed of the social context which gives real individuals their distinguishability:

I never encounter face to face another person's consciousness any more than he meets

mine. I am not for him and nor is he for me a pure existence for itself. We are both for

one another situated beings, characterized by a certain type of relation to men and the

world, by a certain activity, a certain way of treating other people and nature.28

Merleau-Ponty here uses Hegelian language to show that the essence of the individual can be found only in the historically conditioned dialectical relationships between people. One might recall the famous line from Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”29 It is from this historical materialist viewpoint that Marxism, for Merleau-Ponty, seeks to fulfill traditionally liberal humanist ideals:

Therefore it cannot be overemphasized that Marxism only criticizes formal thought to the

benefit of proletarian thought which will be more capable than the latter of achieving

"objectivity," "," and "universality," in other words, of realizing the values of

liberalism. It is in this way that the meaning and measure of Marxist "realism" is given.30

28 Ibid., 108

29 Karl Marx. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1937), 5

30 Merleau-Ponty. Humanism and Terror., 125

22

This supplantment of liberalism as the ideology of humanism comes as a result of the historical exclusion of the proletariat from the rights espoused by the supposedly universalizing liberal humanism:

It is possible to deny that the proletariat will ever be in a position to fulfill its historical

mission, or that the condition of the proletariat as described by Marx is sufficient to set a

on the path to a concrete humanism. One may doubt that all

history's violence stems from the capitalist system. But it is difficult to deny that as long

as the proletariat remains a proletariat, humanity, or the recognition of man by man,

remains a dream or a mystification. Marxism perhaps does not have the power to

convince us that one day, and in the way it expects, man will be the supreme being for

man, but it still makes us understand that humanity is humanity only in name as long as

most of mankind lives by selling itself, while some are masters and others slaves.31

Here, Merleau-Ponty takes a humble approach to the question of Marxism’s relationship to humanism. While he does not seek to assert that the positive claims of Marxism about the destiny of the proletariat, the end of class society, etc. are true, he instead asserts that the Marxist critique of capitalism most certainly pokes holes in any naive notion that liberal democracy has lived out its philosophical convictions; the opposite is readily apparent in the condition of the broad majority of wage-dependent people. This shallow liberal humanism, an ethical outlook wherein “a few mount guard around the treasure of Western ; the rest have to wait” is what Merleau-Ponty calls “humanism of comprehension.”32 Even at this basic level of criticism,

31 Ibid., 155

32 Ibid., 176

23 one ought to feel that the U.S. and the Soviet Union are at a moral impasse at best, neither having the authority to overthrow the other.

Humanism and Terror does not stop, however, with a negative criticism of Western humanist theory and practice. Rather, it goes on to propose an alternative. Against the Western “humanism of comprehension,” Merleau-Ponty opposes a more inclusive alternative:

It would imply that in the end Western Humanism has nothing in common with a

humanism in extension, which acknowledges in every man a power more precious than

his productive capacity, not in virtue of being an organism endowed with such and such a

talent, but as a being capable of self-determination and of situating himself in the world.33

Similar to Lukacs’s idea of proletarian class consciousness, this alternative “humanism in extension” purposefully recognizes universal human value as it appears in the working class’s potential for liberation. In this case, the reappropriation of the human essence is concerned with the free creation of humanity’s destiny. While unlike Lukacs, Merleau-Ponty is not altogether certain of the actual communist movement’s potential for victory, he gives form to a grounded, if understated, idea of Marxist Humanism.

Conclusion

Lukacs’s form of Marxist Humanism depicts the Marxist tradition as having a through-line, drawn by political practice, from Marx’s Eleventh Thesis to Lenin and Luxemburg’s movements

33 Ibid.

24 in Russia and .34 Lukacs did not have to contend, at the time of publication of History and Class Consciousness, with the later, more controversial sides of the Bolshevik revolution, from the outcome of the Russian Civil War to the Stalin leadership. This context allowed Lukacs the privilege of forming a mechanistic analysis; still riding on the wave of victory, it was not difficult to propose easy formulas (e.g. proletarian life plus proletarian agency equals class consciousness). In this aspect, Lukacs’s Marxist Humanism is more capable of optimism about the prospects for revolution and humanism. Lukacs went on to criticize his History and Class

Consciousness as “messianic utopianism,” saying that his theory of class consciousness was itself conceived in abstraction from political practice.35 Ironically, this would imply that Lukacs suffered from the reification which he theorized. Perhaps this failure on his part would give credit his appraisal of the obstacles for the socialist movement, if not his practical proposals.

The form of Marxist Humanism represented by Merleau-Ponty, by contrast, takes a comparatively humble approach. Perhaps due the fact that Merleau-Ponty was implicated in the intense post-war politics of the declining French socialist movement, Humanism and Terror is deeply concerned with countering criticism of Marxism broadly defined (stretching all the way from Marx to Stalin). Lukacs, still celebrating the initial victory of the October Revolution, was focused on criticizing other self-avowed Marxists as being ungenuine. Lukacs saw a between proletarians and the system, and even between the Marxists and their own ideas, but he was blind to that between himself and his analysis. As a spectator outside of the fray, Lukacs saw his own critique as objective. On the other hand, Merleau-Ponty’s sharp critique of liberal humanism is thoroughly demystifying and realistic even with regard to Marxism; he manages to

34 Lukacs. History and Class Consciousness, 221

35 Ibid., xviii

25 place Marxist philosophy and practice above the simplistic binaries of realpolitik/utopianism and objectivity/.

26

Chapter 3 - Marxism, Humanism, and Colonialism

In the former “Third World” and in black and brown communities in the “First World,” there developed theoretical which sought to engage Marxism with non-European conditions and . These traditions often concerned with historical phenomena which problematize the universalizing implications of humanism, such as colonialism, , and the impact of capitalism on economic development. One strain within this set of traditions, represented by the Egyptian economist Samir Amin, views the development of capitalism as a revolutionary break with the previous system of . This revolution, Amin claims, produced ideals which need to be advanced by socialists. Another strain, championed by

American political scientist Cedric J. Robinson, instead saw the advent of capitalism as the organic growth of a set of longstanding trends which came together under feudalism. In this manner, Robinson illustrates capitalism (and its alleged opposite, socialism) as inherently bound up with reactionary ideas. A third strain is presented by Indian historian Vijay Prashad, who seeks to use the history of class struggle in order to complicate contemporary mechanistic notions of culture. These perspectives on history have deep implications for the nature of capitalism, race, nations, colonialism, and of course humanism. Below, I will draw connections between these thinkers’ historical and political context and their conceptions of Marxism and humanism.

Samir Amin, Capitalist Revolution and Humanism

Samir Amin studied political economy in Egypt and then in France, acquiring his doctorate in

Paris. Amin returned to Egypt and joined the Communist Party. He worked as an economist in

27

Cairo until the beginning of anti-communist repression in 1960 by the nationalist government of

Gamal Abdel Nasser. He fled the country, later moving to Senegal where he would work for the

United Nations, NGOs and the communist movement.36 Amin’s dissertation, entitled Uneven

Development, offered a Marxist critique of the history of capitalist development; Amin inverts the traditional notion of Europe as the center of history, arguing that the true political economic centers of were in Africa and Asia. In Amin’s view, Europe was until just a few centuries ago economically and culturally backward and politically unstable. However, Amin asserts, the backwardness and instability of Europe gave it a more fluid class hierarchy in which a revolution of the bourgeoisie could easily take root. It is in this manner that Amin explains the advent of capitalism in Europe.

Amin saw the development of nations as tightly bound to the specific ways capitalism developed in Europe. Amin draws a distinction between a universalizing form of nation, inspired by the Enlightenment and concretized for the first time in the , and the nation of the nationalist variety, realized in Germany and other late-blooming European countries. The difference lies, for Amin, in the revolutionary democratic character of the English and French nations; each was born in the overthrow of the feudal order by the bourgeoisie and was founded upon a social contract rather than ancestral ties. In Amin’s words, “Therein lies the greatness of the French Revolution. It founded a nation, not based on ancestral blood ties or on Christianity, but defined the nation of free men (at the time, the concept of gender equality was from commonly accepted) who took part in the Revolution together who want to live according to its laws.”37 The case of Germany, claims Amin, was very different: “In the case of Germany, the

36 Prabhat Patnaik. “In memoriam: Samir Amin.” IDEAS Network (August 13, 2018) 37 Samir Amin. “The Nation: An Enlightened or Fog-Shrouded Concept?” Research in African Literatures, Vol. 28, No. 4, Multiculturalism (Winter, 1997): 9 28 creation of the unified state was achieved without a bourgeois revolution, as a combined result of

Prussian military might and the rallying of the old aristocracy of individual German states to

Bismarck's national project.”38 Late-developing European capitalist nations, built on the interests of the old landowning classes, could not organize themselves on the basis of revolutionary

Enlightenment values, and thus they formed a nation on the basis of imagined blood relations

(Amin considers these relations “mythological” as opposed to “democratic”39). Amin illustrates the impact of this specific kind of national identity on Germany today: “This explains the absurd situation whereby, according to German law, a Schmidt, whose ancestors emigrated to Russia three centuries ago, is considered a German, while the child of an immigrant Turkish family remains a foreigner.”40 On these grounds, Amin establishes his argument that the concept of the nation is a dialectical one which has two contradictory tendencies: the democratic tendency and the mythological one. One moves in the direction of humanism and the other toward racism.41

These clashing tendencies condition what Amin sees as the present geopolitical situation:

Based on the preceding analyses, I will briefly conclude as follows: Intensified

has put an end to the postwar world order (1945-90) without, however,

leading to a resolution of the fundamental contradiction of capitalism as a worldwide

system, which remains essentially polarizing. The real challenge now facing humankind

is to build a new global society based on principles that will allow the gradual elimination

of the disastrous effects of this polarization.42

38 Ibid., 10 39 Ibid., 17 40 Ibid., 10 41 “For the concept of "nation" has deep mythological roots, among which are the myths that present it as ‘natural’ (thus revealing a biological perception leading to racism), whereas it actually constitutes a social and historical reality.” Ibid., 9 42 Ibid., 18 29

In this situation, capitalism’s formations of nations of the blood-tie variety creates tension within the global system. For this reason, Amin proposes a humanistic alternative:

This goal – to complete the universality initiated by capitalism – in turn calls into

question the concept of the nation, which needs to evolve in a humanistic and democratic

direction, thus leading to a resolution of the contradiction between specificity and

universality. Initiated by the great ideologies (the universalistic of the tributary

period), intensified by the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and reinterpreted by

socialism, the response to this challenge must now be raised to a new qualitative level, in

accordance with the progress of globalization.43

In this manner, Amin draws a through line connecting the Enlightenment and socialism by way of universal humanism, thus extending the French revolutionary “ideology of citizenship”44 to the world as a whole.

Capitalist Development and Racial Capitalism

Cedric Robinson began his activist career in the early 1960s while studying social at U.C. Berkeley. He played a leading role in the Berkeley NAACP, but defied national leadership in inviting radical speakers like Malcolm X and Robert F. Williams to campus.

Robinson also mobilized students in anti-war protests in the wake of the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

After his stint in campus anti-racist organizing, Robinson went to Mexico to study the country’s social dynamics and learn Spanish. When he returned to campus, Robinson took part in

43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 9 30 foundational discussions on the formation of the field Black Studies. Robinson worked for a while in California’s Probation Department, spending much of his time working with young men and boys of color who lived under the same conditions of poverty and white supremacy in which he himself grew up. While his radical politics eventually attracted government attention,

Robinson was in luck as an investigation into his ties with the Communist Party took up most of the time of his mandatory military service; he had only to serve for six months by the investigation’s end. Robinson eventually finished graduate school and became a professor at

SUNY Binghamton, where he produced his controversial work Black Marxism; his magnum opus stunned both liberal and Marxist intellectuals with its critique of popular interpretations of the capitalist history. Robinson adopted Marx’s dialectical method and eye for political economy, but rejected the Marxist historical-materialist theory of history.45

Against Marx’s proposition that capitalist society was founded on the revolutionary destruction of feudalism, Robinson argues that core elements of capitalism such as racism, colonialism, and nationalism were already developed under the feudal mode of production. This new conception of capitalism he dubs “racial capitalism” in order to emphasize bourgeois society’s roots in feudal racism and its development under the influence of race. In this manner,

Robinson characterizes racial capitalism as the product of a quantitative change of feudal conditions rather than a qualitative transformation. Socialism, claims Robinson, was not at its roots an anti-capitalist movement but rather a movement to further the gains of the bourgeois revolution. Even Marxism in particular was, for Robinson, founded upon concepts belonging to the European bourgeoisie; among the most important was the idea of historical development

45 Robin D.G. Kelley. “Cedric J. Robinson: the Making of a Black Radical Intellectual.” Counterpunch (June 17, 2016)

31 proposed in the theory of historical . Built into was the assumption that the development path followed by capitalist Europe was latent in other societies in general. This universalizing notion of development is double-edged, but in the end incorrect.

There did seem to be commonalities in development from place to place, but not the ones Marx and Engels outlined. For example, the early mercantile bourgeoisie of Europe formed merchant colonies in various port cities across Europe, mimicking in smaller scale the later development of colonialism.46 Furthermore, the working classes of Europe were often neither ethnically homogenous nor free from racial hierarchies. The substantial role played by Irish workers in the formation of the British labor movement,47 along with their stigmatization as a lesser people,48 for example, complicated the notion of a proletariat uncomplicated by the problem of race. As feudalism exhibited tendencies which characterize capitalism, there was no radical break from one mode of production to another:

No class was its own creation. Indeed, capitalism was less a catastrophic revolution

(negation) of feudalist social orders than the extension of these social relations into the

larger tapestry of the modern world’s political and economic relations. Historically, the

civilization evolving in the western extremities of the Asian/European continent, and

46 “For security they often traveled in small bands-a habit that would continue into their more sedentary period. It was not long before they began to establish porti (storehouses or transfer points for merchandise) outside the burgs (the fortresses of the Germanic nobles) bishoprics and towns that straddled the main routes of war, communications, and later, international trade. It was these porti, or merchant colonies, that founded, in the main, the medieval cities of Europe's hinterland. It was at this point that the merchants of Europe became bourgeoisies (burgenses). By the beginnings of the twelfth century, these bourgeoisies had already begun the transformation of European life so necessary for the emergence of capitalism as the dominant organization of European production.” Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 14 47 “Indeed, in the early nineteenth century, the opportunities for the formation of successful social movements built on Irish and English workers were frequent and seemed promising. Irish labor leaders took prominent roles in working-class agitation in England (in the Chartist movement for example) and it is a widely held belief that working class movements and organizations in England in general were modeled from Irish organizational methods.” Ibid., 39 48 “The Irish worker having descended from an inferior race, so his English employers believed, the cheap market value of his labor was but its most rational form.” Ibid. 32

whose first signification is medieval Europe passed with few disjunctions from feudalism

as the dominant mode of production to capitalism as the dominant mode of production.

And from its very beginnings, this European civilization, containing racial, tribal,

linguistic, and regional particularities, was constructed on antagonistic differences.49

For Robinson, Marxists have misunderstood these antagonistic relationships, ignoring the fact that these relationships, as they appear in capitalism, were inherited from feudalism.

Against the apparent of Marxism, Robinson upholds theoretical advances made by figures from the tradition of Black , namely W.E.B. DuBois, C.L.R. James, and Richard Wright. All these thinkers encountered Marxism and embraced some of its contributions, but made serious steps beyond Marxism. Robinson claims that the orthodox view of capitalism, promoted by the Soviet-led Third , abstracted capitalism from race and reduced black people to useful tools with which to resist the system. Neither were the humanist forms of Marxism espoused outside of the socialist states innocent of petit- bourgeois abstractions: ,

in either of its two variants-critical-humanist or scientific-has proven insufficiently

radical to expose and root out the racialist order that contaminates its analytic and

philosophic applications or to come to effective terms with the implications of its own

class origins. As a result, it has been mistaken for something it is not: a total theory of

liberation. The ensuing errors have sometimes been horrendous, inducing in their wake

dogmas of characterized by desperation.50

49 Ibid., 10 50 Ibid., 317 33

Robinson points to his best example of a principled adoption of certain Marxist categories along with radical critiques of Marxism on the part of Richard Wright. For Wright, Marxism was an ideology of the petit-bourgeoisie (even DuBois and James couldn’t escape this criticism).51

Structurally, for Wright, petit-bourgeois intellectuals were incapable of creating anti-capitalist theory unconstrained by their relationship of oppression and reliance with the capitalists. This critique very much applied to the leadership of the American Communists, who in spite of the explosion of black nationalist thought in the late 1920s and the 1930s,52 could not make the theoretical advances necessary to understand the racial side of the class struggle; the

Communists were too steeped in the Eurocentric assumptions of Marxism which prioritized economic thought and encouraged mechanistic views of race and class. For Wright, racism was encouraged by the Communists’ detached theoretical standpoint: “From the measured discourse of a Black culture [Wright] illustrated the limits of a socialist movement that persisted in too many abstractions, too far removed, and was prey to the arrogance of racial paternalism.”53

Furthermore, the economistic tendency among Marxists pushed them to project historical trends

(which did not reflect the history of early capitalism) onto the present, resulting in a simplistic view of the workers’ struggle:

As a critique of capitalist society, Marxism was necessary, of course, but it was

ultimately an internal critique. The epistemological nature of historical materialism took

51 “But it was Richard Wright who was better placed than either Du Bois, James, Padmore, Williams, or Cox to articulate the revolutionary consciousness of the Black masses and to assess the cultural debilitation of Marxian politics. Wright had as his vantage points his origins in the rural and urban Black working classes and his of the American Communist movement.” Ibid., 315 52 “Wright had joined the American Communist movement in the early 1930s. This was a period that coincided with an intensification of the party's work among Blacks following the Sixth Congress of the Comintern's "resolution on the Negro Question" in 1928 and the beginnings of the Scottsboro trials in 1931. Wright left the party a decade later.” Ibid., 292 53 Ibid., 315 34

bourgeois society on its own terms, that is, presuming the primacy of economic forces

and structures. As such, the historical development from feudalism of the bourgeoisie as

a class served as a logical model for the emergence of the proletariat as a negation of

capitalist society. Wright appeared quite early to have understood this thesis as a

fundamental error in Marxist thought.54

Wright contended that the Marxists had taken for granted too many of the assumptions of bourgeois political economy, deemphasizing the cultural flexibility and autonomy of the workers. Similarly, even the black rank-and-file of the Communist Party could not grasp the significance and dynamics of culture or the unique aspects of the black liberation struggle; black workers’ views of the world, whether conservative or Marxist, were first and foremost a method of survival under capitalism55. For Wright, the black proletariat was unique; having no legacy of organized labor as white workers did, the black workers were free from the Eurocentric and bourgeois tendencies which were ingrained into the European trade unions. Moreover, black revolutionary consciousness was necessary to the struggle, even as it exceeded the limits of

Marxist theory. In this way, Wright engaged Black Nationalism with Marxism so as to make steps toward a synthesis more capable of illuminating a way to revolution. Even as Wright does not reject Marxism altogether, his criticisms of the tradition pose challenges for any Marxist concerned with racial and the history of the class struggle. Even more so, Cedric

Robinson’s interrogation of Marxism by way of forbearers in black radical thought raises important questions about dogma and racialism in the Communist movement. I myself derive the following question of Black Marxism: “How is Marxism to propose a theory of class struggle

54 Ibid., 299 55 “He [Wright] recognized among his Black co-workers an anger dammed up to the level of destruction of self. It was not an ideology that lay at the base of their need to physically violate errant comrades. Their dogmatism was an enveloping shield against egocide.” Ibid., 295 35 which includes workers of all races if its own theory is steeped in racist assumptions about history?”

Prashad’s of the State and Difference

Vijay Prashad taught South Asian History at Trinity College and today directs the Tricontinental

Institute for Social Research. He is a journalist and a member of the reform-oriented Communist

Party of India (Marxist) which governs the Indian State of Kerala. Prashad’s historical work takes the form of “people’s history,” often concerned with the perspective of peoples made subject to colonialism in the development of the capitalist system.

In his book, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting, Prashad problematizes popular notions of race and culture by highlighting historical connections made between people of the three continents of the Third World both before colonialism and in their struggle for liberation. In an essay from this book, titled “The American Ideology,” Prashad contends with a problem almost identical with the one discussed in Amin’s “The Nation.” Prashad is also concerned here with the history of nation-states and the clash between cultural difference and nationalism. However unlike Amin, Prashad focuses on the development of nations in the Third World as a result of their anti-colonial struggles. Discussing the policies on nationality instituted in India and

Indonesia, both of which adopted the slogan of “unity in diversity,” Prashad observes that these states could detect a dialectical relationship between individual citizens and the multitude of cultural contexts from which they arose: “These states implicitly recognized the contradictions of social identity foisted upon the democratic nation-state, which on the one hand proclaimed the horizontal equality of its citizens and yet realized that each abstract individual was also the

36 ensemble of extant social relations (based on a variety of social fractures).”56 This set of contradictions, Prashad claims, calls into question the relationship between state and citizen in the context of cultural difference. Citing Marx’s “,” Prashad outlines a theory of the state whereby a form of alienation takes hold of the state-citizen relationship: “The state does not emancipate people from distinctions (or undermine the power embedded in certain social locations), but it emancipates itself from them. In addition, the state draws on cultural traditions that form part of the terrain of those distinctions among its peoples.”57 By Prashad’s estimation, states which govern over many remove themselves from the fray of intercultural conflict; instead of working to resolve contradictions between cultures, the state takes on the of role mediation or “management of difference”58

By no means does Prashad claim that the state is a neutral entity; rather he claims quite the opposite especially in the case of the United States:

From its birth as a republic, the United States adopted a slightly different strategy to

manage difference. The state’s motto is e pluribus unum (out of many, one). Its general

attitude toward difference has been that it must be melted and remolded into the identity

of the mythic universal American, one who is forged in the smithy of certain

constitutional values and a product of the vast geographical spaces open to settlement by

sturdy pioneers… This story belies the massacre of the Amerindians, whose stolen lands

became the wide-open spaces of the yeomen and pioneer women, as well of those

enslaved Africans, who by the eighteenth century found their bodies reduced to a fraction

of humanity. Yet the icon of the assimilable immigrant persists, held up as a model for all

56 Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 57 57 Ibid., 58 58 Ibid. 37

residents—new, old, or enslaved—and to all peoples of the world who are to marvel at

this unique experiment in social relations.59

In this manner, Prashad problematizes mainstream forms of universalizing humanism, indicating their real historical significance as instruments of state power. At the same time, Prashad shows the humanistic “difference management” of the American ideology as rather common. However,

Prashad does not reject humanism outright; like Amin, he proposes a different form of humanism, one more honest about the dynamics of culture. To this end, Prashad distinguishes the “multiculturalism” of American ideology from his own proposed “polyculturalism.” For

Prashad, “multiculturalism adopts an idea of culture wherein culture is bounded into authentic zones with pure histories that need to be accorded a grudging dignity by policies of diversity.”60

In other words, multiculturalism views cultures as static and pristine, never comingling with each other and thus digestible, if a bit irritating, to state power. Therefore the state, through multiculturalism, can make the gesture of accepting cultural difference while at the same time keeping different cultures in conflict, blind to their own shared history. One may recall Amin’s connection between the biological nation and racism. Meanwhile, polyculturalism provides a more dynamic alternative which is neither color-blind nor mechanistic with regard to difference:

The theory of the polycultural does not mean that we reinvent humanism without

ethnicity, but that we acknowledge that our notion of cultural community should not be

built inside the high walls of parochialism and ethno-nationalism. The framework of

polyculturalism uncouples the notions of origins and authenticity from that of culture.

Culture is a process (that may sometimes be seen as an object) with no identifiable origin.

59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 61 38

Therefore, no cultural actor can, in good faith, claim proprietary interest in what is

claimed to be his or her authentic culture.61

Here, Prashad rails against the notion of cultural authenticity, proposing that we prioritize the constantly intersecting developments in different cultures over their mythological origins.

Moreover, he asserts that a proper humanism for the left must comprehend culture as always- mixed and ever-changing if it is to honestly pursue equality in a world of difference.

Comparisons and Conclusions

In view of the contributions made by Amin, Robinson, and Prashad to a critique of capitalism from the view of anti-racism and anti-colonialism, it is important to not only highlight their disagreements, but to seek out points of unity which may not be readily apparent. Robinson’s rejection of historical materialism, for instance, may not be altogether contradictory with Amin’s view of history. Amin himself has in the past raised issues with Marx’s view of historical development, namely with the concepts of “feudalism” and “the Oriental mode of production” which he takes to be distortions of one tributary mode of production. In this manner, Amin breaks with dogma on the Marxist theory of historical progression without disavowing Marxism.

I believe this move on the part of Amin is an example of healthy debate within the tradition, which is not a completely new development (Amin made the above argument in Unequal

Development in 1973). Moreover, Amin’s proposal of a democratic and universalizing concept of nations seems compatible with Robinson’s engagement of Marxism with Black Nationalism.

Similarly, Prashad’s theory of the polycultural seems to share the intentions of Robinsons’ critique of petit-bourgeois abstraction in the Communist movement. In the end, each of these

61 Ibid., 65 39 thinkers utilizes a dialectical method in order to question assumptions about the history of class society. It seems to me that the project of a Marxist Humanism is not denied but enriched by the anti-colonial and anti-racist perspectives. For the most part unhampered by the sectarian struggles of the 20th Century Western left, these anti-racists and anti-colonialists had the freedom to question concepts inherited from previous generations stretching back to the advent of capitalism. Even so, we should recall Robinsons’ contention that the petit-bourgeois background of many communists formed their thinking in such a way as to blind them to class-based assumptions. It would be best to point out that out of the three authors I discussed in this chapter, only Robinson was from the working class. In the spirit of his critique, I believe one ought to take the predominance of more well-off individuals in leftist movements both as a serious problem and as being conditioned by historical trends which have kept higher education out of the hands of many working people. Much like reactionary nationalism and liberal multiculturalism, class background may well pose an obstacle to the advancement of a Marxist

Humanism. Let us recall a warning from Althusser:

Simply put, the recourse to ethics so deeply inscribed in every humanist ideology may

play the part of an imaginary treatment of real problems. Once known, these problems are

posed in precise terms; they are organizational problems of the forms of economic life,

political life and individual life. To pose these problems correctly and to resolve them in

reality, they must be called by their names, their scientific names.62

Here, Althusser cautions Marxists about the moralism which seems (in his view) to come attached with all forms of humanism. He fears the danger of losing the materialist approach to

62 Louis Althusser, For Marx, 247 40 problems when one is tempted to confuse moral condemnation with clarification of an issue.

Using Amin’s terms, a humanist depiction of a problem may leave it “fog-shrouded” unless a more critical, theoretical illustration is posed. Let us also recall another remark from Althusser on the preconditions for a Marxist Humanism:

When (eventually) a Marxist policy of humanist ideology, that is, a political attitude to

humanism, is achieved – a policy which may be either a rejection or a critique, or a use,

or a support, or a development, or a humanist renewal of contemporary forms of ideology

in the ethico-political domain this policy will only have been possible on the absolute

condition that it is based on Marxist philosophy, and a precondition for this is theoretical

anti-human-ism.63

I conclude that a Marxist view of humanism does not need to be theoretically anti-humanist, i.e. dismissive of humanism’s potential for real theoretical contribution. Humanism can be more than just an empty slogan meant to aestheticize Marxism. Moreover, this theoretically-capable humanism has already shown signs of development in Merleau-Ponty’s polemics against nuclear war and Vijay Prashad’s efforts to write people’s history; both are historically-minded, materialist, and dialectical as well as directly linked to organizing for class power.

63 Ibid., 231 41

Works Cited

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